"Prescriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Physics of ARISTOTLE, and still continues to be in some of the ancient retreats and conservatories of exploded errors. But these form the exceptions, not the rule of the age, which is free and equal inquiry. Errors have ceased to have prescriptive immunities; and mere conjectures, however sanctioned or plausible, if inconsistent with science—with the ascertained facts of experiment and observation, are speedily passed into the region of ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... circumstance, it loses its self-interpreting or self-defining power, it must be discarded from the language. "It requires tradition, society, and literature to maintain forms which can no longer be analyzed at once."[2] In our own language, such forms may hold their places by prescriptive right or force of custom, and names absolutely unmeaning, or applied without regard to their original meaning, are accepted by common consent as the distinguishing marks of persons and places. We call a man William or Charles, Jones or Brown,—or a town, New Lebanon, ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... and humbuggery I am with you heart and soul. I will set my foot as far as who goes farthest in the exposure of frauds and fakes of every class and kind, though hedged about with the superstitions of a thousand centuries and licensed by prescriptive right to perpetrate a brutal wrong; but it does not follow because some church communicants are hypocrites that all religion is a humbug; that because the Bible winks at incest and robbery , murder and slavery, the book is but a tissue of foolish falsehoods; that because Almighty God has not seen ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... [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 title ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher than to-day—a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of patronage. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... with more than five hundred years of prescriptive standing; this principle which prevailed by usage and acceptance among all modern peoples long before it was embodied in legal form; this primordial deliverance of the spiritual life of the Germanic nations is the substantial fact which our modern society has ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... few model boroughs already possessed. The governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, together forming a town council. The councillors were to be elected directly by ratepaying occupiers, with a saving for the prescriptive rights of existing freemen. They were to hold office for three years; the aldermen were to be elected by the councillors for six years, with a provision for retirement by rotation. The mayor was to be elected annually by the town council. The elementary powers of local government, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... priests and Levites and under the eye of the Sanhedrim or senate, the Jewish religion had lost much of its earlier character. Like philosophy, it was vexed with contending sects. Strict observance of the Mosaic law and the performance of prescriptive rites and duties were in the main regarded ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... third term as Governor of Ohio? What is there in the office that prevents his full and free and complete performance of all the duties imposed upon him as Governor of Ohio? Why, they say the President, by a prescriptive rule that has been established since the time of Washington, cannot be nominated for a third term. What of that? The powers of the Governor of Ohio and the President of the United States are as different as a and z, and are as wide apart as heaven and earth. The President ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... First was raised on high the standard of the Dominican Order of Monks, for the Dominican Order were the founders of the Inquisition, and claimed this privilege, by prescriptive right. After the banner the monks themselves followed, in two lines. And what was the motto of their banner? "Justitia et Misericordia!" Then followed the culprits, to the number of three hundred, each with his godfather by his side, and his large wax candle ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat |
