Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
"There would be forty thousand men under way ere long," he said, "well equipped and provisioned;" and he stated, as the result of personal observation, that England could not be too energetic in, its measures of resistance. He had done something with his little fleet, but he was no braggart, and had no disposition to underrate the enemy's power.
Madame de Bourignon was an excellent woman, but Leslie and Lavington showed that some of her writings seem dangerously to underrate good works. An example may even be quoted from the last century where the nobler elements of mystic enthusiasm were found in one mind combined with the pernicious tendency in question.
But if we carry our folly still farther in the same direction, if we fail to take into grave account the most obvious and inevitable incidents of actual warfare, if in our overweening confidence we neglect discipline, underrate the prime importance of promptness and decision in action, certainty and celerity in movement, and energy and activity in pursuit, if, in a word, we expect that the defences of the enemy are to fall into our hands by means as unwarlike as those that decided the fate of Jericho, or dream that because our cause is just every precedent in history and every principle in human nature will be overruled in our favor, then we deserve to be outgeneralled, and are fortunate, if we escape final and disastrous defeat.
And does his oration show him to possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a principle?
I do not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity.
"If we make one more observation it cannot agree with any one of our determinations, and it changes our probable error. "This ignorance of the masses leads to a misconception in two ways; the little that a scientist can do, they do not understand, they suppose him to be godlike in his capacity, and they do not see results; they overrate him and they underrate him they underrate his work.
If anyone is disposed to underrate the mad passions of which race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the crucial examples which we have had in our own time. We have in our own time seen Great Britain inflamed by two frenzies against France, and against the Boer Republics. In the history of public opinion there are no two chapters more discreditable.
Meanwhile, do not think me so extravagantly magnanimous; do not underrate the satisfaction I must feel at knowing Violante safe from the designs of Peschiera, safe, and forever, under a husband's roof. I will tell you an Italian proverb, it contains a truth full of wisdom and terror, "'Hai cinquanta Amici? non basta.
"I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily settled with....
He saw that he was in for the battle of his life, and that its finish might be deferred for years; for he made no such mistake as to underrate the strength and resources of this triple enemy; he knew that it would last until one or the other were worn out.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking