"Vitiate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acquired an education without teachers, schools, or public libraries; that the peasants in the Vendee in the wars of the Revolution now and then defeated an enemy even without weapons; yet all these exceptions do not vitiate the rule—they only prove it; and therefore, although it is true that under certain special conditions single groups of workingmen in England have been able to improve their condition, to a certain limited extent, in certain minor branches of wholesale production, by an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... will point to cases where we find people of entirely opposite tastes living lives of torture, because grouped in the same family, and forced by circumstances to stay there contrary to their wills. But that does not vitiate the law in the slightest, in each life we contract certain obligations which cannot then be fulfilled. Perhaps we have run away from a duty such as the care of an invalid relative and have met death without coming to ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... military writing particularly, there is no excuse for vague terminology or phrases which do not convey an exact impression of what was done or what is intended. The military vocabulary is laden with words and expressions which sound professional but do not have definite meaning. They vitiate speech and the establishment would gladly rid itself of them if a way could be found. Men fall into the habit of saying "performed," "functioned" or "executed" and forget that "did" is in the dictionary. A ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... infant at the aera of his household catastrophe. And if, through such burning examples of patriotism, far remote collateral descendants entered upon the succession, was this a reproach? Was this held to vitiate or to impair the heraldic honours? A disturbance, a convulsion, that shook the house back into its primitive simplicities of standing, was that a shock to its hereditary grandeur? If it had been, there perished ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... weakness and compromising hesitation. Its principle and refrain, urged with abundant wit, ingenuity and courage, is simply EMANCIPATION—not on the narrow ground of abolition, but on the necessity of promptly destroying an evil which threatens to vitiate the white race. In the beginning the author points out the inevitableness of the present war, and that our political system has been hitherto a sacrifice to Slavery for the time, but also a running up of arrears in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... largely frustrated by the very different conceptions which obtain in the two religions. The Christian incarnation must be, and is, first of all, of a perfect ethical type—an ideal of transcendent moral beauty and spiritual excellence. The least flaw or crookedness in His character would vitiate His pretensions, and would be the death-blow to the doctrine of His incarnation and divinity. In Hinduism, on the other hand, moral criteria have no application to the "descents" or incarnations of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... in moments of forgetfulness, I seldom swerved. At my uncle's, religion was far more tiresome, because they made it an employment; with my master I thought no more of it, though my sentiments continued the same: I had no companions to vitiate my morals: I became idle, careless, and obstinate, but ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the Christian spirit. We shall only strengthen the former as we invigorate the latter. Harm has been done, both to ourselves and to that great cause, by seeking to stimulate compassion and efforts for heathen lands by the use of other excitements, which have tended to vitiate even the emotions they have aroused, and are apt to fail as when we need them most. It may therefore be profitable if we turn to Christ's own manner of working, and His own emotions in His merciful deeds, set forth in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... to be made consul, (and they deny that he was a king who was always doing and saying something of this sort,)—but after Caesar had said this, then this virtuous augur said that he was invested with a pontificate of that sort that he was able, by means of the auspices, either to hinder or to vitiate the comitia, just as he pleased; and he declared that he would do so. And here, in the first place, remark the incredible stupidity of the man. For what do you mean? Could you not just as well have done what you said you had now the power ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... afterwards as it was before. He mixed with water, by agitation, the inflammable air from metals; this also would not succeed with me, although I used only little inflammable air, and much water. He also observed that plants made vitiated air wholesome again. It follows from my experiments that they vitiate air. I kept plants, in the dark as well as exposed to sunlight, in a flask which was filled with vitiated air and carefully secured (which careful securing must really be attended to). I tested a little of this air every 2 days, and always found ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... the 'Magazine of Art,' in which I find an engraving of my portrait of Peabody. I did not know that it would be there, but I have given Mr. Spielman a sort of general permission to use certain of the photographs. I do not know whether the appearance of the head will vitiate the interest of your proposed publication, but I hope not, as the use of it will be of a very ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... shake; totter, totter to its fall; perish &c. 162; die &c. 360. [Render less good] deteriorate; weaken &c. 160; put back, set back; taint, infect, contaminate, poison, empoison[obs3], envenom, canker, corrupt, exulcerate|, pollute, vitiate, inquinate|; debase, embase|; denaturalize, denature, leaven; deflower, debauch, defile, deprave, degrade; ulcerate; stain &c. (dirt) 653; discolor; alloy, adulterate, sophisticate, tamper with, prejudice. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... spread of Christianity, before the record of our Lord's Life had assumed permanent shape in the Four Gospels, all is easy. Such corruption, inasmuch as it beset the oral and written stories which were afterwards incorporated in the Gospels, would creep into the authorized narrations, and would vitiate them till it was ultimately cast out towards the end of the fourth and in the succeeding centuries. Starting from the very beginning, and gaining additions in the several ways described in this volume by Dean Burgon, it would possess such vigour as to impress itself on ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon |
