"Axiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... event has its undercurrent, and of ten the little undercurrents pre-eminently shape the events themselves. The truth of this axiom is illustrated principally in the recall of the resolute, indefatigable, far and clear-sighted patriot and statesman, General Butler. To jump to a conclusion without much ado, the recall of Butler from New Orleans is due principally, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... has never tried; and this odious foreign policy is what, as we are told, foreign states have never pursued. Sir, that is the truest American policy which shall most usefully employ American capital and American labor, and best sustain the whole population. With me it is a fundamental axiom, it is interwoven with all my opinions, that the great interests of the country are united and inseparable; that agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will prosper together or languish together; and that all legislation is dangerous which proposes to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... been sitting,—difficulties, no doubt, considerable. I will give only the dates, having myself no interest in such a Committee at Babiole; but the dates sufficiently betoken that there were intricacies, conflicts between the new and the old. Hitherto the axiom always was, "Prussia the Adjunct and Satellite of France:" now to be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... way to one's temper never helps in a contest of strength or skill. Agnes herself was trying to prove that axiom; but Trix had never tried to ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... have some affinity, although the palpable signs may elude our cognizance. And that they do elude it, except perhaps in a very slight degree, is actually the case, as is well proved by the signal failure of all attempts to reduce them to a science; for neither diagram nor axiom has ever yet corrected an instinctive impression. But man does not live by science; he feels, acts, and judges right in a thousand things without the consciousness of any rule by which he so feels, acts, or judges. And, happily for him, he has a surer guide than human science ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... "Physiology of Common Life" (George Henry Lewes) discussed Liebig's brilliant error in considering food chemically, and not physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... election. Moreover, other States followed California's example. Woman suffrage soon dominated the West, and began its progress eastward. The shrewd Lincoln said that no government could continue to exist half slave and half free; and the axiom is equally true of a divided suffrage. There can be little question that woman suffrage will ultimately be adopted throughout the Eastern States, not because of force, but through the ever-increasing pressure ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... quiet life," was his constant saying; and, like the generality of people with whom those words form a favorite maxim, he led the most uneasy life imaginable. Endurance, to excite commiseration, must be uncomplaining—an axiom the aggrieved of the gentle sex should remember. Sir Piers endured, but he grumbled lustily, and was on all hands voted a bore; domestic grievances, especially if the husband be the plaintiff, being the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... conclude this head by mentioning two examples among others which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy. The first is this axiom, "If to unequals you add equals, all will be unequal." This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice, from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England—while no trace is left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome, of Venice, or Madrid. The soul of those great bodies has fled. Not one of them has preserved itself from destruction, nor formulated this axiom: When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... criminals, the answer was, that it is not the law which is merciful to the earthly offender but the magistrate. The law is an eternal principle. The magistrate may forgive a man without exacting satisfaction. The law knows no forgiveness. It can be as little changed as an axiom of mathematics. Repentance cannot undo the past. Let a man leave his sins and live as purely as an angel all the rest of his life, his old faults remain in the account against him, and his state is as bad as ever it was. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... of the Indiana regiment, was in, command: sent out a big gun; boys went on a big hill; found the enemy were eight or ten thousand strong; big gun ordered back, and as we only had two thousand men, remembered the axiom about "discretion being the better part of valor;" obeyed the aforesaid axiom. Still, recollect, it kept raining in torrents; dripping down Quarter-master Shoemaker's pants into his boots; running over Colonel Anderson's ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... be like a mirror of gold without alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defect in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an affection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... "wanted no crowning indignity but this! You had already proved that the body is made of the basest element— earth. You had argued away the immovability, the ubiquity, the permanency, the eternity, and the divinity of the soul, for is not your favourite axiom, ' It is the nature of limbs which thinketh in man'? The immortal mind is, according to you, an ignoble viscus; the god-like gift of reason is the instinct of a dog somewhat highly developed. Still you left us something ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... to government in general, would be admitted as an axiom; and it would be incumbent on those who might refuse to acknowledge its influence in American affairs to prove a distinction; and to show that a rule which, in the general system of things, is essential to the preservation of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... more than a very pretty comparison, which was suitable for a fable, but which could by no means serve as the foundation for science. He, as frequently happens, mistook his pet hypothesis for an axiom, and imagined that his whole theory was erected on the very firmest of foundations. According to his theory, it seemed that since humanity is an organism, the knowledge of what man is, and of what should be his relations to the world, was possible only through a knowledge ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... to the maximum in the series of conditions in the world of sense, considered as a thing in itself. The actual regress in the series is the only means of approaching this maximum. This principle of pure reason, therefore, may still be considered as valid—not as an axiom enabling us to cogitate totality in the object as actual, but as a problem for the understanding, which requires it to institute and to continue, in conformity with the idea of totality in the mind, the regress in the series of the conditions of a given conditioned. For in the world ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... has a right to attack the rooms of one with whom he is not in the habit of intimacy. From ignorance of this axiom I had near got a horse-whipping, and was kicked down stairs for going to a wrong oak, whose tenant was not in the habit of taking jokes of this kind.—The Etonian, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. You will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. Photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." So at "64," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you begin to ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... his high brow with his slender hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of Anthylla that your illustrious brother has set before us? Your paradoxical axiom commends you at once as a powerful thinker and as the benevolent giver of the best ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... companion? Nothing could be more wide of the truth; but that is the way we judge and misjudge one another. She was almost hurt at his silence, before he spoke again. The fact is, that the general axiom that a man can always put in words anything of which his head and heart are both full, seems to have one exception. Mr. Dillwyn was a good talker, always, on matters he cared about, and matters he did not care about; and yet now, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of mischief. Besides fanning the smouldering sparks of discontent, they served up catchwords wholesale for that section of the British public whose political machinery is largely fed by catchwords. But, as has been decided by axiom, "any stick will serve to beat a dog with," and the Transvaal difficulty was a convenient weapon for the attack on the Government. The real feeling of the Boer community was an outside matter, and, as we shall presently see, had nothing to do with the case, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... all the problems that were connected with such pseudo-propositions. All the problems that Russell's 'axiom of infinity' brings with it can be solved at this point. What the axiom of infinity is intended to say would express itself in language through the existence of infinitely ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... trouble receives settlement in the office of a lawyer, when a receipt and full release of past and future claims is taken by the legal gentleman, who thus secures his client immunity from further demands. It is a well-accepted axiom that under like circumstances the same cause produces the same effect. And so the causes which lead to black-mailing in this city are precisely similar to the influences operating in Paris or London to produce the same ignoble crime. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the life of his master. At his death he might become the chattel of any human brute with a white epidermis and money enough to buy him; might be separated from wife, children, companions and past associations. Suggesting the practical wisdom involved in the biblical axiom that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof, I turned the conversation and presently dismissed him. I experienced some little difficulty in accomplishing the latter, for he was both zealous and familiar in my service: indeed, this is one of the nuisances appertaining to the institution; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on the old geometric axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. I mean that a volleyer must always cover the straight passing shot since it is the shortest shot with which to pass him, and he must volley straight to his opening and not waste time trying freakish curving ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy, stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with a low cunning and a selfish callousness ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... It is natural For a Horse when frightened at anything in Front of him, To jump Backwards, and when frightened at anything Back of him, To jump Forwards. (Applause, in recognition of the accuracy and observation of this axiom.) Now I will show you my method Of correcting this Tendency by means Of my double Safety Rope and driving Rein, without Cruelty. Always Be Humane, Never causing any Pain if you Possibly can Help it. Fetch ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... reason while these moods were on him, has been held up as an authority that may be relied upon as to the doings and sayings of Napoleon and his immediate followers at the "Abode of Darkness." It is a well-known axiom that persons who speak or write anything while jealousy or temper holds them in its grip may not be counted as reliable people to follow, and that is exactly what happened in Gourgaud's case. He was the Peter of the band of disciples at St. Helena, and it may ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... animal organism can also generate heat outside of itself. A blacksmith, for example, by hammering can heat a nail, and a savage by friction can warm wood to its point of ignition. Now, unless we give up the physiological axiom that the living body cannot create heat out of nothing, 'we are driven,' says Mayer, 'to the conclusion that it is the total heat generated within and without that is to be regarded as the true calorific effect of the matter oxidised in ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... circumstances. Sooner or later they need new great principles. Then they obliterate the old ones. The old jingle of words no longer wins a response. The doctrine is dead. In 1776 it seemed to every Whig in America that it was a pure axiom to say that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... though perfectly inexperienced, her confidence in her theoretical knowledge of human nature was unbounded. She had an idea that she could penetrate the characters of individuals at a first meeting; and the consequence of this fatal axiom was, that she was always the slave of first impressions, and constantly the victim of prejudice. She was ever thinking individuals better or worse than they really were, and she believed it to be out of the power of anyone to deceive her. Constant attendance ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... of action, culminating in the Dred Scott decision, has been in the direction of Centralization. During all these changes, it has contrived to have the Constitution always on its side by the simple application of Swift's axiom, "Orthodoxy is my doxy, Heterodoxy is thy doxy," though it has had as many doxies as Cowley. Sometimes it has even had two at once, as in refusing to the iron of Pennsylvania the protection it gave to the sugar of Louisiana. Pennsylvania avenged herself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... appearance or creation of only a few forms of life, or of some one form alone. It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis's philosophical axiom "of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... above court favor, Descartes (1596-1650) elaborated his system of philosophy, in creating a new method of philosophizing. The leading peculiarity of his system was the attempt to deduce all moral and religious truth from self- consciousness. I think, therefore I am, was the famous axiom on which the whole was built. From this he inferred the existence of two distinct natures in man, the mental and the physical, and the existence of certain ideas which he called innate in the mind, and serving to connect it with the spiritual ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 'Capital! An axiom worth putting into print, for the benefit of all and sundry. Now I must say goodbye; that fellow yonder will take me back to the domesticities.' He hailed an empty carriage. 'We shall meet again among the mountains. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Scotland our annals and his tyrannies declare), they sell their birthright and become unworthy the name of men? In that deed they abjure the gift with which God had intrusted them; and justly, the angels of his host depart from them. You know the sacred axiom, Virtue is better than life! By that we are commanded to preserve the one at the expense of the other; and we are ready to obey. Neither the threats nor the blandishments of Edward have power to shake the resolves of those who draw the sword of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Fox, afterwards bishop of Hereford, said to Henry VIII., The surest way to peace is a constant preparation for war. The Romans had the axiom, Si vis pacem, para bellum. It was said of Edgar, surnamed "the Peaceful," king of England, that he preserved peace in those turbulent times "by being always prepared for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... things in Germany are national which elsewhere are universal. And in Germany Socialism is becoming national, as German political economy is national, as German science is national, as German religion is national. Therefore the political axiom that German Socialists would necessarily come to an understanding with their French and English brethren has been falsified by the event. German Socialists have, no doubt, shown their pacific intentions; they have issued pacific manifestoes and organized ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... That is to say, that the law of his time already admitted that in certain circumstances the State could take what belonged to one and give it to another, without there being any fault on the part of the previous owner to justify its forfeiture; and he defends this proceeding on the axiom just cited (ibid., pp. 182-3), namely, its necessity "for the peaceful intercourse of ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... those other two great classes—the Impressionistic and the Biographical—are peculiar in this amongst other things: they alone extract light from refuse and deal profitably with bad art. I am not going back on my axiom—the proper end of criticism is appreciation: but I must observe that one means of stimulating a taste for what is most excellent is an elaborate dissection of what is not. I remember walking with an eminent contributor to The New Republic and a lady who ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... compounds are composed of familiar elements—chiefly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to be united in ways that could not be imitated in the domain of the non-living. It was regarded almost as an axiom of chemistry that no organic compound whatever could be put together from its elements—synthesized—in the laboratory. To effect the synthesis of even the simplest organic compound, it was thought that the "vital force" must be ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... by which the modern community has succeeded in asserting itself against the individual, in protecting the weak from his weakness, the poor from his poverty, in defending the woman and child from the fierce claims of capital, in forcing upon trade after trade the axiom that no man may lawfully build his wealth upon the exhaustion and degradation of his fellow—these things stirred in him the far deeper enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... responsibility, for the simple reason that we have no written constitution; but this responsibility flows as a logical necessity from the dignity of the crown and of the sovereign. 'The King can do no wrong,' says the legal axiom, and hence it follows that somebody must be responsible for his measures, if these be contrary to law or injurious to the country's welfare. Ministers here are not responsible qua ministers, that is, qua officials (as such they are responsible to the crown), but they are responsible ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... achievement—the Doers of the Word. Dr. Howe found his way to Laura Bridgman's soul because he began with the belief that he could reach it. English jurists had said that the deaf-blind were idiots in the eyes of the law. Behold what the optimist does. He controverts a hard legal axiom; he looks behind the dull impassive clay and sees a human soul in bondage, and quietly, resolutely sets about its deliverance. His efforts are victorious. He creates intelligence out of idiocy and proves to the law that the deaf-blind ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... corporal of Arcis had taken. As they drove along, the agent was on the look-out for signs to show why the corporal had been unhorsed. He blamed himself for having sent but one man on so important an errand, and he drew from this mistake an axiom for the police Code, which ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... of a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final arcanum of that, I think, is, Something Nothing. You give this abstraction a concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire Hire for Life. To deny that laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for their work, but solely as a means of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Bores are more frequently clever than dull, and the only all-round definition of a bore is—The Person We Don't Want. Few people are bores at all times and places, and indeed one might venture on the charitable axiom: that when people bore us we are pretty sure to be boring them at the same time. The bore, to attempt a further definition, is simply a fellow human being out of his element. It is said by travellers from distant lands that fishes will not live out of water. It is a no less familiar fact that certain ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... syllogistic principles I call that a [Greek: thxsis] which you cannot demonstrate, and which is unnecessary with a view to learning something else. That which is necessary in order to learn something else is an Axiom. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... being so unfortunate as to make some awkward leaps at the commencement, and showing some concern at his failure, whenever his turn came, he was sure to be greeted with laughter and applause. The audience had elected him clown, nem. con.—thus proving the truth of the axiom, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... it necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set them down, as either fools or pedants. Their very magniloquence condemns them; for, in the present day, it seems an axiom, that simplicity and genius ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Those are the kind of things that make a man thank God for having volunteered to do one's 'bit' in that particular line of life in which he has been placed. No work is grander than a chaplain's; but I must lay it down as a general axiom, that no man should undertake this particular kind of work unless he knows that he is charged with ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... become of the fine arts if all men delighted in dirt, dust, dullness, and desks? Depend upon it, John, that our tastes and tendencies are not the result of accident; they were given to us for a purpose. I hold it as an axiom that when a man or a boy has a strong and decided bias or partiality for any particular work that he knows something about, he has really a certain amount of capacity for that work beyond the average of men, and is led thereto by a higher power ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... of mankind on this matter vary in different countries, making morality an affair of latitude, and what is right and proper in one place wrong and improper in another. It must, however, be understood that, since all civilised nations appear to accept it as an axiom that ceremony is the touchstone of morality, there is, even according to our canons, nothing immoral about this Amahagger custom, seeing that the interchange of the embrace answers to our ceremony of marriage, which, as we know, justifies ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... parliament where he begged for supply, and where he should naturally have used every art to ingratiate himself with that assembly, he expressed himself in these terms: "I conclude, then, the point touching the power of kings, with this axiom of divinity, that, as to dispute what God may do, is blasphemy; but what God wills, that divines may lawfully and do ordinarily dispute and discuss. So is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... displays his great talents? Do you think that none of the gentlemen below the gangway do not believe that in their mute and inglorious breasts, there are no streams of eloquence more copious and resistless? No, my friend, take this as an axiom of political careers, that you hold your life as long as you are able to kill anybody who tries to kill you, and not one ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... advances principles which, at first sight, seem to be quite true; for instance: "Public School Education is necessary for our republican form of government, for the very life of the Republic." "It is an admitted axiom, that our form of government, more than all others, depends on the intelligence of the people." "The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republic form of government could not endure without intelligence and education generally ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... a man of discretion, and my forbearance was in consideration of my friends, whose bodies might perchance gave got scarred by the blows aimed at my foes. Being a friend and fellow fortune seeker, I need have no scruple in saying to you, that I have always held it an axiom, that all great men husband their valor well, and never use it except with great discretion. In truth, and as I hope to honor the profession to which I belong, it was the exercise of that worthy discretion God implanted ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Improvements there were, but they were slow, small in ultimate extent, and in no sense revolutionary. Ships and guns, masts and sails, grew better, as did also administrative processes; it may indeed be asserted, as an axiom of professional experience, that as the military tone of the sea-officers rises, the effect will be transmitted to those civil functions upon which efficiency for war antecedently depends. Still, substantially, the weapons of war were in principle, and ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... pointed out that in any case his acquaintance with Cuba was altogether too recent to have enabled him to form even the most elementary opinion on the question, at the same time mentioning as a general axiom that Englishmen were usually regarded as cherishing a weakness in favour of good government and the ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... in us," announced Mrs. Bowers, with the manner of one who delivers an axiom, "not a little bit. St. Marys happens to be the town near the works, and we happen to be the people ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... observed the Colonel, "the Republic of Plato you would have been saved your initial mistake; for it was an axiom among the Greeks that in all things women are inferior, and never to be trusted in large affairs. The great Plato pointed out, and it has never been controverted, that women are given to concealment and spite; and ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... In fact, severity is seldom necessary in a well conducted education. The smallest possible degree of pain, which can, in any case, produce the required effect, is indisputably the just measure of the punishment which ought to be inflicted in any given case. This simple axiom will lead us to a number of truths, which immediately depend upon, or result from it. We must attend to every circumstance which can diminish the quantity of pain, without lessening the efficacy of punishment. Now it has been found from experience, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the very life of the colonies had, by 1700, become an almost unquestioned axiom in British practical economics. The colonists themselves declared slaves "the strength and sinews of this western world,"[12] and the lack of them "the grand obstruction"[13] here, as the settlements "cannot subsist without supplies of them."[14] Thus, with merchants clamoring at home and planters ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... application of this principle, and tries to prove geometrically the dogmas defined in the Creed. This bold attempt is entirely factitious and verbal, and it is only his employment of various terms not generally used in such a connexion (axiom, theorem, corollary, etc.) that gives his treatise its apparent originality. Alain de Lille has often been confounded with other persons named Alain, in particular with Alain, archbishop of Auxerre, Alan, abbot of Tewkesbury, Alain de Podio, etc. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in England, nor acknowledged by the law; therefore the man James Somerset must be discharged. By securing this judgment Granville Sharp effectually abolished the Slave Trade until then carried on openly in the streets of Liverpool and London. But he also firmly established the glorious axiom, that as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground, that moment he becomes free; and there can be no doubt that this great decision of Lord Mansfield was mainly owing to Mr. Sharp's firm, resolute, and intrepid prosecution of the cause from ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... visitor with a taste for natural history became obtrusive and sought close investigation. It was part of Nickie's duty to fill such visitors with a proper respect for Missing Links, but ninety-nine out of every hundred accepted Mahdi in good faith. It is an axiom in the show business that the people who can't be deceived are so few that they are not ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... soul was not hers, as her soul was not his. That impression, received in a crisis which, she felt, was to be the crisis of her life, had grown to be an axiom. His youth, his vigor, the pull of a stalwart vitality which made his coarseness almost beauty—that had been the attraction. His spirit, so blazing but so full of flaws—that had been ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... likely," replied Mr. Dinks, with the polite air of a man assenting to an axiom in a science of which, unfortunately, he has ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... I believe, a generally received axiom that all mortal affairs must sooner or later come to an end; at all events, the dinner I have been describing did not form an exception to the rule. In due time Mrs. Mildman disappeared, after which Dr. Mildman addressed a remark or two about Greek tragedy to the tall pupil, which led to a 8dissertation ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... presence of her menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim," remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... would say in her most lofty manner. "Shut up, you kids. A fellow can't hear himself speak for your row!" Gurth would call out fiercely. Even when Mrs Saxon was present she would shake her head gently across the table, to enforce the oft-repeated axiom that in so large a family the younger members must perforce learn to be quiet at table. Maud beamed with pleasure at being allowed to continue her never-ending descriptions without a word of remonstrance. She was a fair, pretty, somewhat stupid child, gifted with an overflow of words, which ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal ability as a politician and—very largely—on his unscrupulousness. For it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable methods,—methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must—no matter whether he likes it or not—use his patronage and his power to advance ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... '"It was an axiom with Menabrea, with Nigra, with Corti, that Italy and England herself could do nothing in the Mediterranean without France, still less do anything against France. The last conversation of Corti with Crispi shows plainly his conviction that a real ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... mistake when Orthodoxy or Rationalism reverses the axiom of John, and instead of saying, "Life is the light of man," tells us that "Light is the life of man." Knowledge comes from life. Belief comes from knowledge, and not ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... obsessions of the evil one, who contrived in this manner to give scandal to the faithful, and selected the most godly for his evil purpose. This ingenious defence of the field-chaplain was the saving of my back, for my father, who was a believer in Solomon's axiom, had a stout ash stick and a strong arm for whatever seemed to him to be a falling away ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to generate steam, then, only two steps are required: 1st, procure the heat, and 2nd, transfer it to the water. Now, you have it laid down as an axiom that when a body has been transferred or transformed from one place or state into another, the same work has been done and the same energy expended, whatever may have been the intermediate steps or conditions, or whatever the apparatus. Therefore, when a given quantity of water at a given ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat-Social could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all study, and hands society over to the caprice of the people, or, in other words, delivers it into their own hands.—Hence they demolish all that remains of social institutions, and push ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... which have been described in a former chapter. The Recess Committee, in their enquiries, found that, in the countries whose competition Ireland feels most keenly, Departments of Agriculture had come to recognise it as an axiom of their policy that without organisation for economic purposes amongst the agricultural classes, State aid to agriculture must be largely ineffectual, and even mischievous. Such Departments devote a considerable ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... axiom of Solon "KNOW THYSELF" (Nosce teipsum), applied by the ancient sage as a corrective for our own pride and vanity, Hobbes contracts into a narrow principle, when, in his introduction to "The Leviathan," he would ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... you are right, boy. It is a plague which has paralyzed man's sense of time. You have become involved by not remembering Kant's axiom that time is purely subjective. It exists in the mind only. It and space are the only ideas inherently in our brains. They allow us to conduct ourselves among a vast collection of things-in-themselves ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... you cross the threshold of married life depends your future happiness. It is not a small matter to lay the first stone of an edifice. A husband's first kiss"—I felt a thrill run down my back—"a husband's first kiss is like the fundamental axiom that serves as a basis for a whole volume. Be prudent, Captain. She is there beyond that wall, the fair young bride, who is awaiting you; her ear on the alert, her neck outstretched, she is listening to each of your movements. At every creak of ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... ride into office, or to promote, in some other way, selfish and concealed ends. All such attempts, though they may seem to "run well" for a time, and may result in temporary success, may be safely left to the counteraction of right opinions. For it has always remained an axiom of truth, verified by every day's experience, "That he that diggeth a pit for his neighbor shall himself fall ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... function of the Vindemiatio has been already pointed out; with regard to axioms, he says (N. O. i. 106), "In establishing axioms by this kind of induction, we must also examine and try whether the axiom so established be framed to the measure of these particulars, from which it is derived, or whether it be larger or wider. And if it be larger and wider, we must observe whether, by indicating to us new particulars, it confirm that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... by these trifles when I am contemplating such a desperate deed?" thought he, and he gave a strange smile. "Ah, well, man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice—that is an axiom. I should like to know what people fear most:—whatever is contrary to their usual habits, I imagine. But I am talking too much. I talk and so I do nothing, though I might just as well say, I do nothing and so I talk. I have acquired this habit of chattering during the last month, while I have ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... get warm when I talk of the delicious sex: for though now and then I thrash my wife before company, who shall imagine how cosy we are when we're alone? Do you not remember that great axiom of Sir Robert's—an axiom that should make Machiavelli howl with envy—that "the battle of the Constitution is to fought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... his bloody suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest—that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin's negativeness. In other words, the idea was to be his own, as well us ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... of the "Presse Theatrale", which is kindly sent to me, I remain au courant of your exertions. Be not too much annoyed at being an immortal poet and composer; there is nothing worse in this world to which one should apply the following modified version of Leibnitz's well-known axiom: Tout est pour le mieux, dans un ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... principle of gradation throughout organic Nature,—a principle which answers in a general way to the law of continuity in the inorganic world, or rather is so analogous to it that both may fairly be expressed by the Leibnitzian axiom, Natura non agit saltatim. As an axiom or philosophical principle, used to test modal laws or hypotheses, this in strictness belongs only to physics. In the investigation of Nature at large, at least in the organic world, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... size that which is most remote from the eye will look the smallest. [Footnote: This axiom, sufficiently clear in itself, is in the original illustrated by a very large diagram, constructed like that here ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of the least action is not simply a mechanical, but it is a universal axiom. The Divine Being does all things with the least possible expenditure of force; and all hearts and all minds honor men in proportion as they approach to this divine economy. As gracefulness in motion consists in moving with the least waste of muscular power, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... thinks of one of them, at any rate; for if the mutual verdict of the top of an empire and the bottom of it does not establish for good and all the judgment of the entire nation concerning that book, then the axiom that we can get a sure estimate of a thing by arriving at a general average of all the opinions involved, is ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... administration. If it lead not to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... President that it was not desirable to rob Saint Peter's altar in order to build one to Saint Paul. It might have been simpler to suggest that the consumer would pay the tax, supposing it were ever paid at all, but the axiom was not so familiar three centuries ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... charitable persons—and no more than a recognition of a great constitutional axiom—to assume, in the absence of proof to the contrary, that every British subject is an honest man. Now, if we had gone to Lord Castlemallard for his character—and who more competent to give him one—we know very well what we should have heard about Dangerfield; ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... universe and man. And here is the paradox. This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption. (Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their sorrow into song is an axiom. Yet these men met death, or what is worse, met life, with defiance or impassible fronts. And the world which loves the lilting rhythms of Chopin's mazourkas seldom cares to peep behind the screen of notes for the anguish ambushed there. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... this "the great axiom" of philosophy. That we may distinctly comprehend its meaning, and understand its bearing on the subject under discussion, we must ascertain the sense in which he uses the words "phenomenal" and "relative." The importance of an exact terminology is fully ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in the area of consciousness," Ernst Mallin was saying. "You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... class do not keep money long, and when the proceeds of the robbery had been wasted at cards and in drink they separated. As in fulfilment of the axiom that a murderer is sure to revisit the scene of his crime, one of the men found himself at the Ocmulgee, a long time afterward, in sight of the new town—Macon. In response to his halloo a skiff shot forth from the opposite shore, and as it approached the bank ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... had it been possible, that man should have had a divine book-revelation to tell him that a divine book-revelation was impossible. Great as is my admiration of Mr. Newman, I should, myself, have preferred having God's word for it. However, let us lay it down as an axiom that a human book-revelation, showing you that 'a divine book-revelation is impossible,' is not impossible; and really, considering the almost universal error of man on this subject,—now happily exploded,—the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of Christianity, slavery was an established institution in all countries.[478] Some pagan philosophers, like Seneca, maintained that all men are by nature free and equal, still by the law of nations slavery was upheld in all lands; and it was an axiom among the ruling classes, that "the human race exists for the sake of the few." Aristotle held that no perfect household could exist without slaves and freemen and that the natural law, as well as the law of nations, makes a distinction between bond and free.[479] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of fashion. The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly increasing persistence, how the thing is done. Respectability and malice combine to whisper a truthful answer. Starting from the axiom that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds, they arrive, per saltum, at the conclusion that there must be some third party to provide the wife and the husband with means for their existence. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... Odo's outlook since his visit to Pontesordo was cleared away by the discovery that in a sympathetic study of the past might lie the secret of dealing with present evils. His imagination, taking the intervening obstacles at a bound, arrived at once at the general axiom to which such inductions pointed; and if he afterward learned that human development follows no such direct line of advance, but must painfully stumble across the wastes of error, prejudice and ignorance, while the theoriser traverses the same distance ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... received your letter on the 26th February, and am much obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken about the arias, which are quite accurate in every respect. "Next to God comes papa" was my axiom when a child, and I still think the same. You are right when you say that "knowledge is power"; besides, except your trouble and fatigue, you will have no cause for regret, as Madlle. Weber certainly deserves your kindness. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... this process. It must not be allowed to weigh against the validity of a word once fairly naturalized by use, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable—Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth. And, universally, the class of purists, in matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost constantly proceeding on half knowledge and on insufficient ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... distinguished botanist, and Professor Haeckel, maintain that our experience, as well as the range of our microscopes, is too limited to justify the current axiom. They believe that life may be evolving constantly from inorganic matter. Professor J. A. Thomson also warns us that our experience is very limited, and, for all we know, protoplasm may be forming naturally in our own time. Mr. Butler Burke has, under the action of radium, caused the birth ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... civilizations that had died out,—mostly mere stones to Eaton, whose mind was too preoccupied by his wild enterprise to speculate much on what others had done there before him. Want of water, scarcity of provisions, the lazy dilatoriness of the Arabs, who had never heard of the American axiom, "Time is money," gave him enough to think of. But worse than these were the daily outbreaks of the ill-feeling which always exists between Mussulman and Christian. The Arabs would not believe that Christians could be true friends to Mussulmans. They were not satisfied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... "slinging," "squaring," and "cockbilling" her yards; for "making" and "shortening" sail; "heaving out" her boats and "handling" her cargo, were of course all of the crude and simple patterns and construction of the time, usually so well illustrating the ancient axiom in physics, that "what is lost [spent] in ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... at once such a child as Margaret Fuller was, or would have done even as wisely as he? And how long is it since a wiser era has dawned upon the world (its light not yet fully welcomed), in which attention first to physical development to the exclusion of the mental, is an axiom in education! Was it so deemed forty years ago? Nor has it been considered that so gifted a child would naturally, as she did, seek the companionship of those older than herself, and not of children who had little in unison with her. She needed, doubtless, to ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... form and quantity, is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry, also, the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value, when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... only the product of the evil days when "judgment had fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason." Possibly at no time or place in our history has there been more emphatic verification of the axiom, "In the midst of arms, the laws ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... if the same rule be applied to us, my readers; if every man is mentally a screw, in whose intellectual and moral development a sharp eye can detect something not right in the play of the machinery or the formation of it; then I fancy that we may safely lay it down as an axiom, that there is not upon the face of the earth a perfectly sane man. A sane mind means a healthy mind; that is, a mind that is exactly what it ought to be. Where shall we discover such a one? My reader, you have not got it. I have not got it. Nobody has got it. No doubt, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... reason bring; But a diviner fury, fierce and high, Valour transported into ecstasy, Which angels, looking on us from above, Use to convey into the souls they love. You now that boast the spirit, and its sway, Shew us his second, and we'll give the day: We know your politic axiom, lurk, or fly; Ye cannot conquer, 'cause you dare not die: And though you thank God that you lost none there, 'Cause they were such who lived not when they were; Yet your great general (who doth rise and fall, As his successes do, whom you dare call, As fame unto you doth reports dispense, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... gulf between them. It is no doubt perfectly true, in a certain sense, that all difference of function is a result of difference of structure; or, in other words, of difference in the combination of the primary molecular forces of living substance; and, starting from this undeniable axiom, objectors occasionally, and with much seeming plausibility, argue that the vast intellectual chasm between the Ape and Man implies a corresponding structural chasm in the organs of the intellectual functions; so that, it is said, the non-discovery of such vast differences proves, not that they ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ounce ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... not to fly, my little chevalier," replied the captain; "it is an axiom of the art which I advise you to consider; besides, I am not sorry to study your play. Ah! you are a pupil of Berthelot, apparently; he is a good master, but he has one great fault: it is not teaching to parry. Stay, look at this," continued he, replying by a thrust in "seconde" to a ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... there's hope," came Frank's brave reply in his favorite axiom. "We'll live to fly the old Golden Eagle ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... you would have others do unto you." This simple and fundamental axiom Jefferson Ryder had adopted early in life, and it had become his religion—the only one, in fact, that he had. He was never pious like his father, a fact much regretted by his mother, who could see nothing but eternal damnation in store ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... amongst his opinions anything but what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to his mind that he could have no occasion to hold it in doubt." In this absolute isolation of his mind, without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his own personal existence by that famous axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle of his edifice, concluding ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... philosophy of the complex vision assumes as its only axiom the concrete reality of the "soul" within us which is so difficult to touch or handle or describe and yet which we feel to be so much more real than our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... development, nor to the establishment of normal self-control, especially as regards sexual habits and manifestations. The Committee cannot ignore the fact that the leading medical and psychological authorities lay it down as an axiom that the power of self-control is at its highest when the individual is physically active, well-nourished, and in perfect bodily health, and that impaired control always accompanies impaired nutrition, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... islanders. It is but due to your merit that you should be appointed to the command of it; and further to testify my infinite esteem for your character, and my complete confidence in your abilities, I make you post-captain on the spot. As the axiom of your school seems to be that everything can be made perfect at once, without time, without experience, without practice, and without preparation, I have no doubt, with the aid of a treatise or two, You will make a consummate naval ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... other countries. The attention of the mercantile part was chiefly employed about staple commodities; and as their great object was present profit it was natural for them to be governed by that great axiom in trade, whoever brings commodities cheapest and in the best order to market, must always meet with the greatest encouragement and success. The planters, on the other hand, attended to the balance of trade, which was turned in their favour, and concluded, that when ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the "primrose path" to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid rocks, by years of this most wicked axiom. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... abandoned the hope, which his intense interest in the fate of his country had inspired, that the United States might act in behalf of Hungary, he yet returned again and again to the subject. On one occasion he said; "I take it for an axiom that there exist interests common to every nation comprised within the boundaries of the same civilization. I take it equally for certain that among these common interest none is of higher importance than the principles of international law." Nor did he hesitate ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... then recur, Will our surplus labor be then more beneficially employed, in the culture of the earth, or in the fabrications of art? We have time yet for consideration, before that question will press upon us; and the axiom to be applied will depend on the circumstances which shall then exist. For in so complicated a science as political economy, no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances. Inattention to this is what has called for this explanation, which reflection would ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson |
