"Nullity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the days of the Revolution, voted God from his throne. They abolished the Sabbath, and declared that Christianity was a nullity. They set apart one day in ten, not for religion, but for idleness and licentiousness. History informs us that the goddess of Reason, personified by a naked prostitute, was drawn in triumph through the streets of Paris, and that the municipal officers of the city, and the members of the National ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... although they proved that they could work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. I had not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is divinity conformant unto philosophy, and generation not only founded on contrarieties, but also creation. God, being all things, is contrary unto nothing; out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something, and omneity informed nullity into an essence. ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... they were progressing Everywhere was feverish excitement, dissipation, and nullity It was a relief when they rose from the table Money troubles are not mortal One amuses one's self at the risk of dying Scarcely was one scheme launched when another idea occurred Talk with me sometimes. You will not chatter trivialities ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... made to follow attempts to violate the principles of equity, except the possible inconvenience of changing from one creamery to another. The straight and honorable patron is powerless; the owner of the creamery is powerless; and the co-operative element is rendered a nullity. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... direction of the islands. The sort of yearning I feel towards those lonely rocks is indescribably acute. This town, that is usually so full of wild human interest, seems in my present mood a tawdry medley of all that is crudest in modern life. The nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor give me the same pang of wondering disgust; yet the islands are fading already and I can hardly realise that the smell of the seaweed and the drone of the Atlantic are still ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... neighbors in Garum. Mr. Pullet had bought the box, to begin with, and he understood winding it up, and knew which tune it was going to play beforehand; altogether the possession of this unique "piece of music" was a proof that Mr. Pullet's character was not of that entire nullity which might otherwise have been attributed to it. But uncle Pullet, when entreated to exhibit his accomplishment, never depreciated it by a too-ready consent. "We'll see about it," was the answer he always gave, carefully abstaining from any ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Ganges, who shared in some measure the beauty so profusely showered upon the family, was one of those feeble men who enjoy their own nullity, and grow on to old age inapt alike for good and evil, unless some nature of a stronger stamp lays hold on them and drags them like faint and pallid satellites in its wake. This was what befell the chevalier in respect of his brother: submitted ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... her sister's husband. Besides she would have needed the Pope's dispensation for such a union—as Philip had already explained to her—while her birth and crown were the results of a Papal dispensation being declared a nullity. She would thus have fallen into a self-contradiction, to which she must have succumbed in course of time. When told that Philip II had done her some service, she acknowledged it: but when she meditated on it further, she found that neither this sovereign nor any other influence whatever ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... conviction that she was really a good woman and an inability to believe that the King could be misled, much less do her a deliberate and conscious wrong. But some sort of admission which she made before him was interpreted by the Archbishop as involving the nullity of the marriage. Anne was executed: next day, the King married Jane Seymour; the marriage with Anne was officially declared to have been invalid; Elizabeth being of course de-legitimatised, and so occupying precisely the same position ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... of support independent of her husband. Permanent alimony is that which is allotted to the wife after final decree. By the Matrimonial Causes Act 1907, the court may, if it think fit, on any decree for dissolution or nullity of marriage, order that the husband shall, to the satisfaction of the court, secure to the wife such a gross sum of money or such annual sum of money for any term not exceeding her life, as having regard to her fortune (if any), ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ignored. The right of property in man is just as sacred to him, "as a Pennsylvanian," as the right of property in iron or coal. He unhesitatingly accepts the Dred Scott decision as law, which the moral sense of the nation and its ablest jurists pronounced a nullity. Mr. Jefferson, in speaking of slavery, said he trembled for his country, and declared that one hour of bondage is fraught with more misery than whole ages of our colonial oppression. Such a sentiment in the mouth of Mr. Buchanan would have been as unnatural ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... power of talking about anything save horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful blankness—he is written out. The rush after money has latterly brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... conscience was convenient and skilful. He believed in the "ordinance of inseparable matrimony," so, when he wished to divorce a wife, his conscience warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence his nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne of Cleves. Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his relations with Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount were obviously not adultery, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... committed to the Tower. Rumours of what would please or displease the Queen, or messages from the Queen, like that prohibiting the House to interfere in matters of religion, in those days reduced the voice of the House to a nullity. Wentworth's chief question was, "Whether this Council be not a place for any member of the same here assembled, freely and without control of any person or danger of laws, by bill or speech to utter any of the griefs of this Commonwealth whatsoever, ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... a sweetheart, however, by a good deal, but merely a follower tolerated for the day, and on the score of convenience only. He was a tall, gaunt, pale young man, with long hands and feet, slouching shoulders and narrow chest, and a strange, indescribable nullity of expression dwelling upon his features. He did not appear to be encouraged much by little Straw-Goods, whose mind was probably occupied with prospective possibilities of being led out to the festive dance by Young New York. Altogether, he was an unsatisfactory-looking ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... [See "The Nullity of the Pretended Assembly at Saint Andrews and Dundee," &c., p. 312. Printed in the year 1652. As many had been under age when the Solemn League and Covenant was first sworn the Commission of the General Assembly ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Canada. The party convention is now the all important portion of the machinery for the election of the president, and the safeguard provided by the constitution for the choice of the best man is a mere nullity. One thing is quite certain, that party government under the direction of a responsible ministry, responsible to parliament and the people for every act of administration and legislation, can have far less dangerous tendencies than a party ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... life. She knew precisely how narrow his mind was, how empty his thoughts, and how cold his heart. She had long since found out that the brilliant man of the world, whom everybody considered so clever, was in reality an absolute nullity, incapable of any thought that was not suggested to him by others, and at the same time full of overweening ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... his part well. In all the parts of his correspondence which were intercepted there never was found the least confirmation of this suspicion. Be this as it may, Bonaparte could not endure him; he did not make him acquainted with what was going on, and his influence rendered this mission a mere nullity. The General-in-Chief concentrated all the business of the negotiation in his own closet; and, as to what was going on, Clarke continued a mere cipher until the 18th Fructidor, when he was recalled. Bonaparte made but little ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... disaster, the causes of the breach of faith, be surrendered in time-honoured fashion to the enemy as an expiation for the violated pledge? On the first point there was little hesitation; the senate decided for the nullity of the treaty, and it was likely that this view would be accepted by the people, if the measures against the ratifying officials were not made too stringent. For on this point there was a difference of opinion. The poorer classes, whose sons and brothers had been saved from death or captivity ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... own hearth, she looked so gentle, sweet, and lovely. No longer wild and shy, or gayly mischievous and watchful, but calm-eyed, firm-lipped, gravely courteous; intent upon her father's face, and banishing not into shadow so much as absolute nullity any one who dreamed that he ever filled a pitcher for her, or fed her with grouse and partridge, and committed the incredible atrocity of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... have her mild as a sheep.' (Eustacie set her teeth.) 'Every one will be in the same story, that her marriage was a nullity; she cannot choose but believe, and can only be thankful that we overlook the escapade and ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the same thing in America as in Britain, or else that the British Parliament pay less regard to it here than there. But, that we do not point out to his Majesty the injustice of these acts, with intent to rest on that principle the cause of their nullity; but to show that experience confirms the propriety of those political principles, which exempt us from the jurisdiction of the British Parliament. The true ground on which we declare these acts void, is, that the British Parliament has no right to exercise ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... involving the principle of the Higher Law. The subject was a bill reorganizing the National Guard, with the intent of sifting it as clean as possible of the popular element, and thus rendering it either a nullity, or an accomplice in the execution of the Monarchical conspiracies now brewing. It is but a few days since Gen. Changarnier solemnly informed the Assembly, in reply to President Bonaparte's covert menaces at Dijon, that the army could not be made to level its muskets and point its cannon at the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... does in England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit, and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, but Paris, with all its men-and-women ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... — N. inexistence^; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; negativeness &c adj.; nullity; nihility^, nihilism; tabula rasa [Lat.], blank; abeyance; absence &c 187; no such thing &c 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, Nirvana, obliteration. V. not exist &c 1; have no existence ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... consequence was that the situation of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence, for the tendency of the later law, as I have already hinted, was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority. But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty. Led at first by justifiable disrelish for the loose practices of the decaying heathen world, but ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... his infallibility. In England, similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this source at least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs. Grundy, or those which the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion, differences merely of taste may be sufficient to detract ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in this discussion, concerns us—namely, the Marxian theory of labour as the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as production goes, of every form of activity associated with the possession of capital, or with any class ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... demanded the gravest thought. It was desired to avoid if possible the drowsy nullity of the Canadian Upper House and the preponderating "bossiness" of the American. Nor did the example of Australia, where the Senate, elected on a "general ticket" over huge provincial areas, becomes thereby a sort of National Labor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a mere appearance is scarcely a presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... said, 'The Congress shall have power to lay excises.' They say, 'The Congress shall not have this power;' or, what is equivalent, they shall not exercise it, for a power that may not be exercised is a nullity. Your representatives have said, and four times repeated it, 'An excise on distilled spirits shall be collected;' they say, 'It shall not be collected. We will punish, expel, and banish the officers who ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... bosom all these weaknesses, all this egotism, all these vices. Mirabeau was venal, Barnave jealous, Robespierre fanatic, the Jacobin Club blood-thirsty, the National Guard selfish, La Fayette a waverer, the government a nullity. No one desired the Revolution but for his own purpose, and according to his own scheme; and it must have been wrecked on these shoals a hundred times, if there were not in human crises something even stronger than ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... there be two, they will be irresistible when they agree; and whenever they differ, every thing will be decided by a struggle for ascendancy between the rivals. This cause is alone enough to reduce the German Bund to almost a nullity, independently of its wretched internal constitution. It effects none of the real purposes of a confederation. It has never bestowed on Germany a uniform system of customs, nor so much as a uniform coinage, and has served only to give Austria and Prussia a legal right of pouring ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... of their feeling for Furst and Company, Berlin Society was farther obliged to pronounce the claim of Miller Arnold a nullity, and that no injustice whatever had been done him. Mere pretences on his part, subterfuges for his idle conduct, for his inability to pay due rent, said Berlin Society. And that impartial Soldier-person, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to forego ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... strange or perverted disposition, they confounded the abuse of knowledge with knowledge itself; as if, because men abuse the power of speech, their tongues should be cut out; as if perfection and virtue consisted in the nullity, and not in the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... that is come in the shape of the cholera, which broke out at Sunderland a few days ago. To meet the exigency Government has formed another Board of Health, but without dissolving the first, though the second is intended to swallow up the first and leave it a mere nullity. Lord Lansdowne, who is President of the Council, an office which for once promises not to be a sinecure, has taken the opportunity to go to Bowood, and having come up (sent for express) on account of the cholera the day it was officially declared really to be that disease, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... and delivery of possession made. But in some cases this was a mere conventional statement, and both payment and delivery were delayed. There was to be no return of the goods, no turning back from the bargain; the pleading of a suit of nullity of sale is expressly barred. It is of interest to notice who were regarded as competent, or likely to take action to recover the property. Sons, grandsons, brothers, brothers' sons, are all named. The enumeration clearly included females of the same nearness of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... date of its enactment, been virtually a dead letter. Messages of Presidents, complaints of government attorneys, of collectors and agents called attention to the continuous violation of the law; and its nullity was a matter of common knowledge. When the market price of a slave rose to $325 in 1840 and to $500 after 1850, the increase in profits made slave piracy a rather respectable business carried on by American citizens in American built ships flying ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... disinherit him, for passing him over in silence avoids the will; and this rule is so strict, that even if the son die in the lifetime of the father no heir can take under the will, because of its original nullity. As regards daughters and other descendants of either sex by the male line, the ancients did not observe this rule in all its strictness; for if these persons were neither instituted nor disinherited, the will ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... have filled your Heaven with the grossest and most cherished harlots from here below, who have bent their knees piteously before you at their hour of death! I tell you, you have used force against me, and you know not, you omniscient nullity, that I never bend in opposition! I tell you, all my life, every cell in my body, every power of my soul, gasps to mock you—you Gracious Monster on High. I tell you, I would, if I could, breathe it into every human soul, every flower, ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... and he added some words, by which it was easily understood that the king's authority had to be superior to Guillaume de Caen's commissions. Pont-Grave replied at once: "I see that you believe in the nullity of my commission!" "Yes," replied Champlain, "when it comes in conflict with the king's and the viceroy's authority." This petty dispute had no serious consequence, as it was evident that Pont-Grave, being only the first clerk of Guillaume de Caen, had no other ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... remarkable for that spirit of charity or toleration upon which he afterwards founded his own government, and which now, in after ages, constitutes his brightest title to renown. The first of these opinions was that the royal charter to the Colony of Massachusetts was a nullity, because the King of England had no right to grant lands in foreign countries, which belonged of right to their native inhabitants. This opinion struck directly at all right of property held under ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... have not a single friend— that every one betrays us, some out of hatred, others out of weakness or ambition. In short, I actually am reduced to dread the day when they will have the appearance of giving us a kind of freedom. At least, in the state of nullity in which we are at present, no one can reproach us.... You know the character of the person with whom I have to do.[10] At the last moment, when one seems to have convinced him, an argument, a word, will make him change his mind before any one suspects it. This is the ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... alone, I was, for the most part, considered as a cipher in everything; and this not only in the company of Madam D'Epinay, but in that of M. d'Holbach, and in every place where Grimm gave the 'ton'. This nullity was very convenient to me, except in a tete-a-tete, when I knew not what countenance to put on, not daring to speak of literature, of which it was not for me to say a word; nor of gallantry, being too timid, and fearing, more than ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... weariness. 'Tis in pain that Nature disposes them for maternity; in pain and illness, dangerous and prolonged, she brings maternity to its close. What is a woman after that? Neglected by her husband, left by her children, a nullity in society, then piety becomes her one and last resource. In nearly every part of the world, the cruelty of the civil laws against women is added to the cruelty of Nature. They have been treated like weak-minded children. There is no sort of vexation which, among civilised peoples, man ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Jefferson's nobility that one of his first efforts was to undo, so far as he could, the mischief effected by the detested Sedition law. Every man who was in durance because of its operation was pardoned, and he looked upon the law as "a nullity as obsolete and palpable, as if congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to bear ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... friendly conversations. You need concord, union, and peace. Why then do you retain among you men who excite rivalries and jealousies; why permit great and violent controversy and ambitious pretensions? How do your own words and acts agree? If your Masonry is a nullity, how can you exercise any ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of the debt which they had incurred to humanity. They robbed Italy of her freedom, but they gave her back the philosophy of Plato. They reduced the generality of Florentine citizens, who were once omnipotent, to a nullity; but they had at least, the sense to cherish Donatello and Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... their obligations and privileges, and as such be prepared for, and brought into, the spiritual communion and fellowship of the Church, on coming to the years of accountability, is, it appears to me, to make the Sacrament of Baptism a nullity, and to disfranchise thousands of children of divinely chartered rights and privileges. Mr. Wesley, in his Treatise on Baptism, in stating the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... in argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them at such times were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority. Turn your eyes to those ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... liberties. Like his ancestor Charles the Bold, he was desirous of constructing a kingdom out of the provinces. He was disposed to place all their separate and individual charters on a procrustean bed, and shape them all into uniformity simply by reducing the whole to a nullity. The difficulties in the way, the stout opposition offered by burghers, whose fathers had gained these charters with their blood, and his want of leisure during the vast labors which devolved upon him as the autocrat of so large a portion of the world, caused him to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... scent had never for an instant been lost. There was no flaw in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret to its ultimate result,—and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive us it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew. 'There must be something wrong,' I said, 'about the nail.' I touched it; and the head, with about a quarter of an inch of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "flying squadron," who, later in the day, inspected and laughed at the corpses as they lay stripped in the court-yard, being especially curious about the body of Soubise, from whom his wife had sought to be divorced on the ground of nullity of marriage. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... we know, was the affianced husband of Isabella Wardle, and to the scenes of their marriage, the festivities, &c., we owe some pleasing incidents. Trundle was a good specimen of the cypher or nullity; naturally, he is a figure at Manor Farm, but does nothing, and practically says nothing. He was clearly a neighbouring squire of limited ideas, or plain country gentlemen, that could do no more than love his Isabella. Yet, while Boz describes the "affairs" of Arabella ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... with Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael's father had appointed Wentworth as his son's guardian. If it had been a jealous affection ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... frequently at the fort in New York, he should come once to his house, where he might be assured he would be welcome. Hereupon the governor returned again to New York with his object unaccomplished, and shortly afterwards, by proclamation, declared the nullity of the government of Carteret; that at the most he was only the head of a colony, namely, New Jersey; and that he was guilty of misusing the king's name, power, and authority. He sent boats several times to Achter Kol to demand ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... obliged me with a sight of your letter to him of the 22d Dec. last. I think I am not so clearly of opinion as you seem to be, that "the declaratory act is a mere nullity," and that therefore "if we can obtain a repeal of the revenue acts from 1764, without their pernicious appendages, it will be enough." Should they retract the exercise of their assumed power, you ask when will ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... Not only the bishops had to confirm, ordain to all orders, consecrate, anoint, impose penance, and excommunicate, but they had to decide land questions concerning lands in frank almoin, all probate and nullity of marriage cases, and to do all the legal work of a king's baron besides. The judicial duties lay heavily upon him. He used to say that a bishop's case was harder than a lord warden's or a mayor's, for he had to be always on the bench; they only sometimes. They might look ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... things were made by men for their own race and age; they never thought of you,—you are an eavesdropper. Cathedrals were built for Christians to pray in, not for connoisseurs to gloat over. You should develop along your own lines, strong and simple, not be a many-sided nullity. The true Englishmen are ploughmen and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... was filled with morning when a noise startled Davidge out of nullity. He was amazed to find a strange woman asleep at his elbow. He remembered ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... reformation of the calendar, enabled him to discover many of what were then called the Secrets of Nature. The popular belief that he was the inventor of gunpowder had its origin in two passages in his treatise "On the Secret Works of Art and Nature, and on the Nullity of Magic,"[37] in one of which he describes some of its qualities, while in the other he apparently conceals its composition under an enigma.[38] He had made experiments with Greek fire and the magnet; he had constructed burning-glasses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... affairs, thinks that Government will probably be under the necessity of adopting strong coercive measures there; but whether they are adopted, or a temporary policy of expedients persisted in, nobody is there fit to advise what is requisite. The Duke of Northumberland is an absolute nullity, a bore beyond all bores, and, in spite of his desire to spend money and be affable, very unpopular. The Duchess complains of it and can't imagine why, for they do all they can to be liked, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say) to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:—Parmenides ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... then, and emerge from this state of nullity. You owe it to yourself, you owe it to me, you owe it to your country, you owe it to the memory ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... not shock the haughty claims of the pontiff, he resolved not to found the application on any general doubts concerning the papal power to permit marriage in the nearer degrees of consanguinity; but only to insist on particular grounds of nullity in the bull which Julius had granted for the marriage of Henry and Catharine. It was a maxim in the court of Rome, that if the pope be surprised into any concession, or grant any indulgence upon false ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... he had been reduced to a nullity, and escaped attention all this time: he sat in gloomy silence, and watched with chilled and foreboding heart the strange turn events had taken, and were taking; events which he, and no other man, had ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... suzerainty into sovereignty. Thus, in spite of the servitude into which the people had sunk at the end of the tenth century, from this moment the enfranchisement of the people makes way. In spite of the weakness, or rather nullity, of the regal power at the same epoch, from this moment the regal power begins to gain ground. That monarchical system which the genius of Charlemagne could not found, kings far inferior to Charlemagne will little ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... hurriedly; and later, with visible effort to recapture the perfection of well-trained nullity.—"He only asked ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... "had been wholly neglected." In short, the Acts passed in our different Islands for the pretended purpose of bettering the condition of the slaves have been all of them most shamefully neglected; and they remain only a dead letter; or they are as much a nullity, as if they had never existed, at the ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... in the very words of this petition, it would be void." [Footnote: Quincy's Reports, p. 474.] While so sound a man, otherwise, as John Adams wrote, in 1776, to Mr. Justice Cushing: "You have my hearty concurrence in telling the jury the nullity of acts of Parliament.... I am determined to die of that opinion, let the jus gladii say what it will." [Footnote: Works of J. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... has ever resisted a people who fight for their liberty and who defend their sacred rights. Your heroic endeavours have already reduced our unjust aggressors almost to complete nullity. Without infantry to cover their parapets, without artillery to fire their pieces, without money, without credit, and without support, they already make their last useless efforts. On our side, on ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Grandlieu had been sold by the Republic. It came to Derville's knowledge that there were flaws in the title, and he thought that it ought to return to the Vicomtesse. He instituted proceedings for nullity of contract, and gained the day. Encouraged by this success, he used legal quibbles to such purpose that he compelled some institution or other to disgorge the Forest of Liceney. Then he won certain lawsuits against the Canal d'Orleans, and recovered ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... supplementary chapter in the late John A. Goodwin's "Pilgrim Republic," soon to be published. Perhaps the case of Wade was rather a decree of nullity than a divorce. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldly success of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particular causes of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink into insignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, they disappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul, fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world. Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... finding that admirable which we before condemned—that damnable which we had previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity—and this ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... down to the springs of human nature. He had not merely analysed the woman till her character lay in ruins around him, but he had built her up again out of the psychic atoms, and Laura was alive. She showed the hand of the master by her own nullity. In her splendid vanity she was like some piece of elaborate golden fretwork, from which the substance had been ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a new era. Many English kings had occasionally committed unconstitutional acts; but none had ever systematically attempted to make himself a despot, and to reduce the Parliament to a nullity. Such was the end which Charles distinctly proposed to himself. From March, 1629, to April, 1640, the Houses were not convoked. Never in our history had there been an interval of eleven years between ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny; and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace, and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone could render again a strictly literal ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... soon found herself a nullity at the court of Francois I. Her young husband was in love with Diane de Poitiers, who certainly, in the matter of birth, could rival Catherine, and was far more of a great lady than the little Florentine. The daughter of the Medici was also outdone by Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... of his age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary life than his Paradise Lost. Even his own Puritan party who had passed the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely detailed divorce laws of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... passive instrument in the hands of others, to be used at their discretion. Though living, he was dead as to all voluntary agency. Though moving amidst the creation with an erect form, and with the shape and semblance of a human being, he was a nullity ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... colony as a mine to be worked, not a trust to be administered; forced dependence upon the mother country for manufactures, even for produce, so far as duties can effect it; self-government stifled; representation in the Cortes denied or a nullity; a civil service unprogressive, ignorant, sometimes corrupt—compare these handicaps with the growth, the prosperity, the independence, above all, the decent and orderly administration, of the colonies of England. One ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... more submissive. There had been a struggle at first when the oath of the succession had been tendered to them, and Prior Houghton, with the Procurator, Humphrey Middlemore, had been committed to the Tower. The oath affirmed the nullity of Queen Katharine's marriage with the King on the alleged ground of her consummated marriage with Henry's elder brother, and involved, though the Carthusians did not clearly understand it so at the time, a rejection of the Pope's authority as connected ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... having wedded Lord Huntly's sister fourteen months before. And now in May, came in the new consistorial jurisdiction of the Archbishop, for the only act which that prelate ever performed under it was to confirm a sentence of nullity of this very marriage, and that on the ground that Bothwell and his wife being too nearly related, had not procured a Papal dispensation (the Papal dispensation having not only been procured before the marriage, but having been granted by the hands of the Archbishop himself ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... always careless, generally intemperate, and oftentimes dishonest parents, they never see the inside of a school-room, and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, it is to them a nullity." It appears that, at that time, in 12 wards of the city, there were 2,955 of these children, of whom two-thirds were females between the ages of 8 and 16. I am informed, also, by the Chief of Police, that 100 per cent. should now be added to this estimate; ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Government of Mexico ever submitted the protocol to the Congress, or ever treated or regarded it as in any sense a new negotiation, or as operating any modification or change of the amended treaty. If such had been its effect, it was a nullity until approved by the Mexican Congress; and such approval was never made or intimated to the United States. In the final consummation of the ratification of the treaty by the President of Mexico ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed, nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in universal history; and it can be attained only by recognizing the positive existence, in which that negative element is a subordinate and vanquished nullity. On the one hand, the ultimate design of the world must be perceived, and, on the other, the fact that this design has been actually realized in it, and that evil has not been able permanently to establish a rival position. But this conviction involves much more than the mere belief in a superintending ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... success. He was intelligent enough to be fully conscious of the fact and the significance of the popular request for a constitution, and, though of course personally disinclined to reduce his power to a nullity, he had yet not a strong will, and had no wish to involve himself in a conflict with his subjects. Accordingly, in 1841, he convoked a diet in each province, and proposed the appointment of committees from the estates, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the sea. The original stock being nearly everywhere extinct, the races have become degenerated amidst corruption and ignorance. The descendants of our noble families at Genoa, at Naples, at Venice, and at Rome, are, for the most part specimens of absolute intellectual nullity. Almost every thing that has worked its difficult way in art, in literature, or in ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... decision. In response to an order from the Council, Las Casas wrote his treatise entitled, The Liberty of the Enslaved Indians (De la libertad de los Indios que han sido reducidos a la esclavitud) which, for greater convenience, he divided into three parts. The first part treated of the nullity of the title on which such slavery was based; the second dealt with the duties of the Spanish sovereign towards the Indians, and the third was devoted to the obligations of the bishops of the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... but even if there should be information, citation, decree, and verdict obtained by surprise, default, and contumacy, I have still the alternative of a conflict of jurisdiction to gain time, and a resort to the means of nullity that will be found in ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... right, they could marry; but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in the joy of it—never. He could not have faced his mother. It seemed to him that to sacrifice himself in a marriage he did not want would be degrading, and would undo all his life, make it a nullity. He would try ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the Union are by force of the Constitution coequal in domestic legislative power. Congress can not change a law of domestic relation in the State of Maine; no more can it in the State of Missouri. Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity; it takes away no right, it confers none. If it remains on the statute book unrepealed, it remains there only as a monument of error and a beacon of warning to the legislator and the statesman. To repeal ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... have already descanted, and who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of musical study and training, has at last gone far to redeem her reputation of artistic nullity, by producing the greatest landscape painter of which the country can boast. With us, the superiority of atmospheric effects over most countries, and the great variety and originality of American scenery, have united in bringing the landscape painter into existence, and the public have assured ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Exchequer a prize, there is but one possible contingency in which the prize can be restored to the opposite belligerent, and that is the one already mentioned of a capture within neutral jurisdiction. And this is done on the ground of the nullity of the original capture. The prize is pronounced not to have been lawfully made, and this being the case, and the vessel being within the jurisdiction of the neutral whose waters have been violated, there is but one course to pursue. The vessel does not belong to the ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes |
