"Pivotal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come up from Indiana, pivotal State as it has been long called in national elections, saying that he represented the wish of one hundred and forty thousand Indiana men, gentlemen, would you scorn his appeal? Would you treat it lightly? Not at all. You know that it would ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... subtler phases of the nooks and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the business of the Novel to represent? Do not our fiction and drama to-day—the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other regards—find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under new conditions ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of mere aesthetic culture: it goes to the very heart of the meaning of the abused word, Gentleman, and proves its root to be unselfishness. The author says: 'It is the moral element which, in my conception of the gentleman, is pivotal. Dealing with the highest type, I conceive that in that type not only are morals primary, but that manners result from them; so that where there is not a solid substratum of pure, elevated feeling there cannot be a clean, high, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed. Lindsay was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for four and five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbow up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the club. The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... will be in the fortieth year of its history. Its people have seen pain, strife and defeat, they have gone through excitement and anxiety and patient waiting, and at times have almost given up the strife. But the province and its great city, Winnipeg, are the meeting place of the East and West, the pivotal point of the Dominion. The national life of Canada throbs here with a steadier beat and a more normal pulse than it does in any other part of Canada, its dominating Canadian spirit is so hearty and so ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of 1848—and the concurrent return of the Mexican soldiers—seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his old comrade, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... place on the Yadkin where Cornwallis decided not to cross. It was one of the pivotal points of the war, and is ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... travellers like themselves, along a dusty roadway, on our way to Caen; we were of no particular importance in the landscape, we and our rickety little phaeton. Yet only a moment before, in the inn court-yard, we had felt ourselves to be the pivotal centre of a world wholly peopled with friends! This is what comes to all men who live under the modern curse—the double curse of restlessness and that itching for novelty, which made the old Greek longing for the unknown deity—which is also the only honest prayer of so many fin ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... announces, is that if the SPEEDWELL had not been overmasted, both she and the MAY-FLOWER would have arrived early in the fall at the mouth of the Hudson River, and the whole course of New England history would have been entirely different. Ergo, the "overmasting" of the SPEEDWELL was a "pivotal point in modern history." With the idea apparently of giving eclat to this announcement and of attracting attention to it, he surprisingly charges the responsibility for the "overmasting" and its alleged dire results upon the leaders of the Leyden ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... of sickness is to centralization. Every invalid at least begins by being pivotal in the household. But with the earliest hint that the case is chronic, things recoil to their own centres again; people begin to come and go in the gayest way; they laugh and eat immensely, and fly through the halls asking if one couldn't take a bit of stuffed veal. And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... time before reached the field, only to fall before the bullets of the foe. His men took an active part in the fray, and swept backward the tide of war. The Swedes were again driven from the battery and across the ditch, with heavy loss, and the imperialists regained the pivotal point of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... entire system of principles, privileges, and obligations." [1] The "independent competency of the local church" is directly opposed to any system of episcopal government within the church, and is diametrically opposed to any control by king, prince, or civil government. Yet this was one of the pivotal dogmas of Browne and of the later Separatists; this, a fundamental doctrine which Barrowe strove to incorporate into a new church system, but into one having sufficient control over its local units ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... to wait, with as much patience and good-humor as they could command, the news from the pivotal States, while others shouted frantically about fraud. A number of leading politicians were sent by each party to the State capitals, where the National interest was concentrated, and the telegraph wires ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... inauguration of an era distinctive in human hope, endeavor, and achievement. His advent determined a new order in the reckoning of the years; and by common consent the centuries antedating His birth have been counted backward from the pivotal event and are designated accordingly. The rise and fall of dynasties, the birth and dissolution of nations, all the cycles of history as to war and peace, as to prosperity and adversity, as to health and pestilence, seasons of plenty and of famine, the awful happenings of earthquake ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... different theory would stand little chance of being intrusted with the construction of a palace of peace. Similarly, a statesman who, while proclaiming that the era of wars is not yet over, would deprive of strategic frontiers the pivotal states of Europe which are most exposed to sudden attack would deserve to find few disciples and fewer clients. Yet that was what Mr. Wilson aimed at and what some of his friends affirm he has achieved. His foreign colleagues re-echoed his dogmas after having emasculated them. It ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fiscal purpose, whether the alleged need be real or not. The production of war material is a matter of military policy on all fours with the maintenance of Government dockyards, and does not enter into the fiscal problem properly so called. But to the special case of dyes, considered as a "key" or "pivotal" industry, I ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... living really sway the universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort of worlds, that the sun ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence |
