"Prescriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very proud; aye, and so she may be, scornful as you look—as if you would like to say 'how came a water-carrier of Serapis by her pride, a poor creature who is ill-fed and always engaged in service, pride which is the prescriptive right only of those, whom privilege raises above the common herd around them?—But this girl, you may take my word for it, has ample reason to hold her head high, not only because she is the daughter of free and noble parents and is distinguished by rare beauty, not because ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... in the various districts of the island; and the emigrant population are usually in attendance on their teaching. The census is an imperfect index of actual strength, the smaller sects exerting proportionately more influence. When the claims of prescriptive authority are finally exchanged for a reliance on moral power these discrepancies will disappear, and a vast apparatus, already supplied by the state and private zeal, will bring within reach of every colonial family some form of Christian doctrine. The tendency of small communities ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... in real money. The right honorable gentleman suspecting, with all his absolute dominion over fact, that he never will be able to defend even this venerable patriarchal job, though sanctified by its numerous issue, and hoary with prescriptive years, has recourse to recrimination, the last resource of guilt. He says that this loan of 1767 was provided for in Mr. Fox's India bill; and judging of others by his own nature and principles, he more than insinuates that this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... three and four miles when that prescriptive comfort and relief to wanderers in woods—a distant light—broke at last upon her searching eyes. It was so very small as to be almost sinister to a stranger, but to her it was what she sought. She pushed forward, and the dim outline of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... attracted the attention of the State authorities in the land of their origin. When the conflict with Parliament began, the rights and immunities claimed by the American colonies, were not matters of statute and charter. The prescriptive right, which is founded in long-established custom and usage, rather than in positive enactment, was the ground of resistance to the encroachments of the Provincial Executive. When James Otis, in pleading against the "Writs of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... perhaps, for the occasion. Return we to our pictures. Certainly we are not in danger of being led into any profound or fanciful speculations by the ignorant painters of the later schools of art. In their "Nativities," the ox and ass are not, indeed, omitted; they must be present by religious and prescriptive usage; but they are to be made picturesque, as if they were in the stable by right, and as if it were only a stable, not a temple hallowed to a diviner significance. The ass, instead of looking devoutly into the cradle, stretches out his lazy length in the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... striking example of the class of Scottish humour which, with our dialect, has lost its distinctive characteristics. John Clerk (afterwards a judge by the title of Lord Eldin) was arguing a Scotch appeal case before the House of Lords. His client claimed the use of a mill-stream by a prescriptive right. Mr. Clerk spoke broad Scotch, and argued that "the watter had rin that way for forty years. Indeed naebody kenn'd how long, and why should his client now be deprived of the watter?" etc. The chancellor, much amused at the pronunciation of the Scottish advocate, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... finally quelled by the interposition of the Papal legates, and the balloting proceeded without interruption. The vote of the bishops alone remained to be taken. The Archbishop of Mayence rose, and exercising his prescriptive title, gave the first voice for Rodolph of Suabia. Adalbert and the other bishops followed his example. Otto, Welf, Berthold, ranged themselves on the same side, and amid universal acclamations ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... he thought the possessor of so much wealth and the husband of so noble a lady deserved to have a title, he dubbed himself "prince," and continued to enjoy this self-given title, probably in the hope that an uncontested use would give him a prescriptive right to bear it. In this hope he was disappointed, for Count Medem, an attache of the Russian embassy at Paris, noticing "Prince Demidoff" on the list of the members of the Jockey Club, crossed the name out, adding the observation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... is, of course, prescriptive. But given its age and its purpose this ought not to be construed in the contemporary, pejorative {4} sense. Collado, as Rodriguez and indeed all the grammarians of the period, felt obligated to train their students in those patterns of speech which were appropriate to the most polite elements ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... however, are after all small matters. It is the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Why should one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right to fill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on from morning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Why should pate de foie gras and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequally distributed? Why should those who have ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... puff. Albert when under age had instituted the puff, and when over it had organized the tariff. By the puff-a-farthing method the cigarettes could not be confiscated, for they belonged only to those who had a prescriptive right to them, while the puffers, with a little cunning, were able to ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... [Charles Lamb, in "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago" (Prose Works, 1836, ii. 30), records his repeated visits, as a Blue Coat boy, "to the Lions in the Tower—to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the Abbot was a mitred prelate or not. Fuller, in his Church History, is in doubt about it, while Bishop Godwin admits that some of the Abbots sat in Parliament. The Abbots, without enjoying any prescriptive right, were summoned to Parliament in the reigns of Henry III., Edward I., and Edward II., and the last Abbot (Wakeman) was certainly summoned as a mitred Abbot. It may be that the Abbot received the dignity in the time of Abbot Strensham, who ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... their openly living together—that he could not stand. But at that moment the exquisite happiness of seeing her every day, coming into the room where she was reading or singing, and kissing her as he leaned over her chair affectionately, as a matter of course, deriving his enjoyment from the prescriptive right to do so, and then talking to her about ordinary affairs of life, came upon him suddenly like a vision; and this imagined life was so intense that for one moment it was equivalent to the reality. He saw himself taking her home from the theatre at night in the brougham. In ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... any and what prescriptive power or privilege in said House to imprison its members ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke |
