"Indefeasible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that it can neither be established nor prohibited by Congress, but that the people of a Territory, when organized by Congress, can establish or prohibit slavery; while the third is, that the Constitution itself secures to every citizen who holds slaves, under the laws of any State, the indefeasible right to carry them into any Territory, and there hold ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... No man will need to mortgage his home and the earnings of his most vigorous years to a boomer or speculator for the privilege of living on the earth for there will be no boomer or speculator to sell him the privilege, and the privilege itself will have ceased to be such and become an indefeasible right. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... pressure appears to be an infringement of the privileges of a free parliament and an aggression on the rights of the people. They hold that all sections of the community, whether electors or non-electors, have an indefeasible right to have matters affecting their interests submitted to the unbiased judgment, and decided by the unfettered discretion of the members sent to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... and lift his hearers from the letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time and case. The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my tribunal. He has to show not the law, but that the law applies. Can he convince me? then he gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving various counsels ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... being (as some persons have supposed) a wilful and corrupt conspiracy on the part of the evilly disposed, against the peace and prosperity of the realm, may claim a most ancient and indefeasible right to existence. They, with their ancestors and near relatives, constitute Literature,—without which the human race would be little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like sunshine upon a landscape, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... for light. It provided (s. 3) that "when the access and use of light to and for'' (any building) "shall have been actually enjoyed therewith for the full period of 20 years without interruption, the right thereto shall be deemed absolute and indefeasible, any local usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding, unless it shall appear that the same was enjoyed by some consent or agreement, expressly made or given for that purpose by deed or writing.'' The statute does not ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... were not fully expressed till later, for he always kept his thoughts at call. Writing to Wordsworth in September, 1805, he says:—"Hang work! I wish that all the year were holyday. I am sure that Indolence indefeasible Indolence is the true state of man, and business the invention of the Old Teazer who persuaded Adam's Master to give him an apron and set him a-houghing. Pen and Ink and Clerks, and desks, were the refinements of this old ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... actions, therefore, of right and wrong, justice and injustice, morality and immorality are simply unintelligible to it, just as unintelligible as they are to the most highly developed animal. It is the fully developed mind or intelligence alone which apprehends the sublime conception of duty, and the indefeasible claims which it has upon the allegiance of the will, and, in consequence, the scientist who denounces injustice and iniquity is no longer on the tripod of the professor, but in the rostrum of the ethical teacher. If ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Military discipline had not impregnated any of the allied nations, whose ideas of personal liberty and dignity would oppose an insurmountable obstacle to that severe discipline which was essential to military success. Great Britain, they believed, would cling to her ingrained notions of the indefeasible right of the British workman to strike and of the British citizen to hold back from military service. And the telegrams announcing that in the United Kingdom the cries of "business as usual," "sport as usual," "strikes as usual," "voluntary ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... scheme" is one which "will absolutely abolish all economic distinctions, and prevent the possibility of their ever again arising." And how would it accomplish this end? "By making," says the writer, "an equal provision for all an indefeasible condition of citizenship, without any regard whatever to the relative specific services of the different citizens. The rendering of such services on the other hand," the writer goes on, "instead of being left to the option of the citizen, with the alternative ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... and defence of our adopted country, as well as in the vindication of our rights as Britons, ... to have recourse to the last remedy of the oppressed, we appeal to God and the world, as to whether we shall not have indefeasible right and eternal justice on our side. So help us God." A league, based on moral force, and disclaiming all weapons but those of persuasion and entreaty, was evidently at an end if armed resistance were contemplated as the final resource. The earnest objections of the delegates were ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... with indubitable genius—then he must be too much the slave of the conventional and the ordinary to understand that Poetry metamorphoses herself in many diverse forms, and that its one sovereign and indefeasible justification is—truth."—London ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... his conduct. It was Mr. Slide's taste to be an advanced reformer, and in all his operations on behalf of the People's Banner he was a reformer very much advanced. No man could do an article on the people's indefeasible rights with more pronounced vigour than Mr. Slide. But it had never occurred to him as yet that he ought to care for anything else than the fight,—than the advantage of having a good subject on which to write slashing articles. Mr. Slide was an ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... certainly intended by that wise and excellent man, as an eternal memento of the wisdom and goodness of the very principles that settled America. But I must again return to the feudal law.——The adventurers so often mentioned, had an utter contempt of all that dark ribaldry of hereditary indefeasible right,—the Lord's anointed,—and the divine miraculous original of government, with which the priesthood had inveloped the feudal monarch in clouds and mysteries, and from whence they had deduced the most mischievous of all ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... our imaginations can now conceive." "The instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is government; though a little later we are to find that the main business of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that the people must be sovereign, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... France, they offered to acknowledge Louis, the eldest son of Philip, for their sovereign, on condition that he would afford them protection from the violence of their enraged Prince. Though the sense of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their King, they declined insisting before Philip on a pretension which is commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns and which sounds harshly in their royal ears. They affirmed that John was incapable of succeeding to the crown, by reason of the attainder ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is registered in ideal history and no inventory of the world's riches, no true confession of its crimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. This indefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of ideal immortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell who have not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of birth; and, in fact, both Tiberius, to whom Christ commanded that tribute should be given, and Nero, whom Paul directed the Romans to obey, were, according to the patriarchal theory of government, usurpers. In the middle ages the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right would have been regarded as heretical: for it was altogether incompatible with the high pretensions of the Church of Rome. It was a doctrine unknown to the founders of the Church of England. The Homily on Wilful Rebellion had strongly, and indeed too strongly, inculcated submission ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the confiscation of property cast in wrecks upon a shore, and its forfeiture to the sovereign of the territory, is one of the most striking instances of aggression made by law on the natural and indefeasible ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... forces and through some inward flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. Shelley in Alastor, the influence of which on Browning in writing Pauline is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Parliament, which is also, under present conditions, the Imperial Parliament, and to the consequent habitual use of the word "Imperial" in two quite different senses. It is this last confusion which makes such a declaration as Mr. Asquith's about safeguarding "the indefeasible authority of the Imperial Parliament" a mere equivocation, for it affords no indication as to whether the supremacy retained is the effective and direct control maintained by Canada over Ontario, or the much slighter and vaguer supremacy exercised by ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... should be a rebel against the state, the loyal brotherhood can not expel him from the lodge, and his relation to it remains indefeasible." (Moore's Constitutions, Art. 2.) A Mason may be engaged in a wicked rebellion, and may stain his soul and hands with innocent blood, and still he must be recognized as "a brother" and must continue to enjoy all the boasted rights and advantages of the order; ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... which can be supposed to militate against the hypothesis that the said authorities understand a great deal better than he does what their wants are, and how they ought to be supplied; or to maintain the peace of India without questioning the indefeasible title of the native chiefs to do what they ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... will cleave to society for ever. And the way in which a corn-law—that is, a restraint upon the free importation of corn—affects the case, is this:—Relieving the domestic farmer from that part of his anxiety which points to the competition of foreigners, it confines it to the one natural and indefeasible uncertainty lying in the contingencies of the weather. Releasing him from all jealousy of man, it throws him, in singleness of purpose, upon an effort which cannot be disappointed, except by a power to which, habitually, he bows and resigns himself. Secure, therefore, from all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... is evident, that though preference was naturally and properly given to hereditary claims, the monarchy of Scotland, as well as of England, was in principle "elective". The doctrine of hereditary, of divine, of indefeasible "right", is of ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... good, forced to condition and dispose itself according to the clear revelations of God. It was not mere negation to an oppressive hierarchy, except as it was first positive and evangelic touching the direct and indefeasible relations and obligations of the soul to its Maker. Only when the hierarchy claimed to qualify these direct relations and obligations, thrust itself between the soul and its Redeemer, and by eternal penalties sought to hold the conscience bound to human authorities and traditions, did the Reformation ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... day fell upon the wedge like the stroke of a hammer. Sometimes they drove it: oftener the wedge stayed still where it was. But it never slipped back. When it was stubbornest, and the days seemed to lose their weight, when Valerie's hold seemed indefeasible, when the woods were quick with memory, when Anthony heard an old faint sigh in the wind, and the laughter of a brook fluted the note of a soft familiar voice, then more than once that strange, cool, silvery call had stolen out of the distance, to melt upon the air as soon as uttered and ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... minority, the most despised sect, exist by their own right. The most friendless and lonely human being on American soil holds his right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and all that goes to make them up by title indefeasible against the world, and it is the glory of American self-government that by the limitations of the constitution we have protected that right against even ourselves. That protection cannot be continued and that right cannot be maintained, except by jealously ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... "illegal, inflammatory and tending to promote unjustifiable combinations" against his Majesty's peace, crown and dignity, we take the liberty to testify and publickly to declare, that it is the native, inherent and indefeasible right of the subject, jointly or severally, to petition the King for the redress of grievances. - And we are clearly and very firmly of Opinion that the petition of the late dutiful and loyal house, and the other very orderly ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... rulers have said, that English diplomacy can no longer recognise "nationalities," but only existing "governments." God grant that they may see in time that the assertion of national life, as a spiritual and indefeasible existence, was for centuries the central idea of English policy; the idea by faith in which she delivered first herself, and then the Protestant nations of the Continent, successively from the yokes ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... moral sense of the world. Rather than re-awaken the discussion, so unsparing, so painful, and so indelicate, which had been carried on so many years around that loved form, now sanctified by death, they sacrificed the dear pleasure of the memorials, and the interests of mankind, who have an indefeasible right to all the help that can be got from the truth of history as to the living power of virtue, and the reality of that great victory ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... firmly established &c. v.; deep-rooted, ineradicable; inveterate; obstinate &c. 606. transfixed, stuck fast, aground, high and dry, stranded. [movable object rendered unmovable] stuck, jammed; unremovable; quiescent &c. 265; deterioration &c. 659. indefeasible, irretrievable, intransmutable[obs3], incommutable[obs3], irresoluble[obs3], irrevocable, irreversible, reverseless[obs3], inextinguishable, irreducible; indissoluble, indissolvable[obs3]; indestructible, undying, imperishable, incorruptible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... intelligence as I could wish in a woman. If there were a stupider one to be found, I would set out to seek her. This girl, whose name is Dinah, will never criticise me; she will never contradict me; I shall be her Upper Chamber, her Lords and Commons. In short, Paul, she is indefeasible evidence of the English genius; she is a product of English mechanics brought to their highest pitch of perfection; she was undoubtedly made at Manchester, between the manufactory of Perry's pens and the workshops ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac |
