"Magna Charta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two laws have been called the Magna Charta of the solar system, and were long supposed to guarantee its absolute permanence. So far as the theory of gravitation carries us, they do guarantee its permanence; but something more remains to be said on the subject in a future ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the reader remembers the way in which I was led, while teaching the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think, recognize the hand of Providence. Anterior to that, when Mr. Moffat began to give the Bible—the Magna Charta of all the rights and privileges of modern civilization—to the Bechuanas, Sebituane went north, and spread the language into which he was translating the sacred oracles, in a new region larger than France. Sebituane, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... red, and got into a towering rage, and threatened to tear up the Magna Charta to spite them all. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... settlement of the crown, formed a league for mutual protection and cooperation. The very parchment on which the terms of this union were written "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, as shown in Baker's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... nobles and bishops met him at Runnymede on the river Thames, a few miles west of London, and compelled him to sign a list of promises. As the list contained sixty-three separate promises, it was called the Great Charter or Magna Charta. If John did not keep these promises, the lords and clergy agreed to make war on him, and he even said that this would ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... wall, behind the Marshalls, is the effigy of Robert Ros, Governor of Carlisle in the reign of John. He was one of the great Magna Charta barons, and married the daughter of a king of Scotland, but he was not a Templar, for he wears flowing hair, which is forbidden by the rites of the Order; at the close of his life, however, he took the Templars' habit ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... of the deliberations is the formal grant by Duchess Mary of the "Groot Privilegie," or Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland. Although this instrument was afterwards violated, and indeed abolished, it became the foundation of the republic. It was a recapitulation and recognition of ancient rights, not an acquisition of new privileges. It was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the barons in 1215, John sought refuge within the castle, and in the same year signed the two charters, Magna Charta and Charta de Foresta, at Runnymede—a plain between Windsor and Staines. A curious account of his frantic demeanour, after divesting himself of so much power and extending so greatly the liberties of the subject, is given by Holinshed:—"Having acted so far contrary to his mind, the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... old women about town that they are young and handsome, and give some well-timed parties, and she may still keep the society which she hath been used to. The times are not so hard as they once were, when a woman could not construe Magna Charta with anything like impunity. People were full as gallant many years ago. But the days are gone by wherein my lord-protector of the commonwealth of England was wont to go a lovemaking to Mrs. Fleetwood, with the Bible under ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appropriation of money to meet the expenses which had been incurred by the crown officers in quartering troops in Boston. The members nobly met this demand by returning to the Governor (July 15, 1769) a grandly worded state-paper, in which, claiming the rights of freeborn Englishmen, as confirmed by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, and as settled by the Revolution and the British Charter, they expressly declared that they never would make provision for the purposes mentioned in the two messages. On the same day, it was represented in the House that armed soldiers had rescued a prisoner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... 'Why, that's Magna Charta!' Dan whispered. It was one of the few history dates that he could remember. Kadmiel turned on him with a sweep and a ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... when he confirmed "Magna Charta," used the expression, On the word of a gentleman, a king ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... stirring a drama might have easily cleared its expenses—despite the length of the cast, the salaries of the stars, and the rent of the house—in mere advance booking. For it was a drama which (by the rights of Magna Charta) could never be repeated; a drama which ladies of fashion would have given their earrings to witness, even with the central figure not a woman. And there was a woman in it anyhow, to judge by the little that had transpired at the magisterial ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel." How many, like him, have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity, and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious ointment of spikenard with which ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with his pipe and glass, and ready for any amount of Self-Government. And the Chairman stood up and briefly explained the business of the meeting. He said the Parish Councils Act was the logical result of Magna Charta, and would have the effect of making us all citizens of our own parish; and that as the expense of this would come upon the rates, we should endeavour to use our hardly won enfranchisement with moderation. "We had met to choose eleven good men and ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Englishmen for their Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and that of Americans for their national Constitution, seem weak in comparison with the intense gratitude and reverence of the Five Nations for the "Great Peace" which Hiawatha and his ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The year 1215, which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died at Assisi and Thomas was ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... ago under the hospitable roof of Lord Houghton. Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C. He is now the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885, which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the land-ownership to them on merely ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... at the restriction of Sunday liberty. It is only the liberty of the senses that suffers. A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty, social liberty, will work out of it. Sunday is the common people's Magna Charta." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to weigh your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission to the Constitution of inequality of rights or disfranchisement on ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... are of course Norman. An hereditary aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail—these are Norman. By the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of Britain—these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... practical politics of the fundamental principles of responsible government which he had analyzed in his earlier writings, including the book on "Congressional Government." Beneath the concrete campaign issues in New Jersey he saw the fundamental principles of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. His trained habit of thinking through concrete facts to basic principles was serving him well in this campaign; his trained habit of clear exposition in the Princeton ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... of ages, choose! What owe ye to the past? The burly men who Magna Charta wrung >From tyranny entrenched would stand aghast To see the ripples from that stone they flung, They, too, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy |
