"Vitiate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... propositions usually regarded as among the most marked examples of truths whose negations are inconceivable. But occasional failure, he says, is incident to all tests. If such failure vitiates "the test of inconceivableness," it "must similarly vitiate all tests whatever. We consider an inference logically drawn from established premises to be true. Yet in millions of cases men have been wrong in the inferences they have thought thus drawn. Do we therefore argue that it is absurd to consider ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... acquainted with some of the agencies which vitiate the quality of the brain, and it is our duty to profit by its results. The principal of them is morbid action in the brain itself, producing, more or less directly, disorder and weakness. But its deteriorating influence does not cease with the individual. In a large proportion of cases it is transmitted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... without incident. The terrestrial midnight arrived. The 8th of December was beginning. One hour more, and the point of equal attraction would be reached. What speed would then animate the projectile? They could not estimate it. But no error could vitiate Barbicane's calculations. At one in the morning this speed ought to ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the sear and yellow leaf", rust, crumble, 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. pervert, prostitute, demoralize, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... George had continued to be well satisfied with his work up to the interval. He considered that he had perfectly succeeded in separating the lover and the examinee, and that nothing foreign to the examination could vitiate his activity therein. It was on the day of repose, a Wednesday, that a doubt suddenly occurred to him as to the correctness of his answer, in the "Construction" paper, to a question which began with the following formidable words: "A girder, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... of the land. It is the more forcible as concurring with the judgment in the 11th of Richard II., and with the total silence of the Rolls and Journals concerning any objection to pleading ever being suffered to vitiate an impeachment, or to prevent evidence being given upon it, on account of its ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of a well-used metaphor is that it should completely fulfil this function: there should be no by-products of imagery which distract from the poet's aim, and vitiate ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... demands the sacrifice. But to make an individual ridiculous merely because he has written a foolish, if it be a harmless book, is not, I think, justifiable on any moral principle ... I repeat my principle. Whatever tends to vitiate our literary taste, our morals, our religious or political principles, may be fairly at the mercy of criticism. So, whatever tends to introduce false science, false history, indeed, falsehood in any shape, exposes itself to the censor's ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... sense; here the 1,260 days and 3.5 days are the days appointed for their work and death. It is well to remember that many of the prophetic numbers contain a double prophecy. Thus 1,260 here may be coincident with the treading down of Jerusalem by Mahommedanism. But whether it is or not, does not vitiate the literal quantity when applied to these two witnesses. In the third place, they are called two olive trees and two candlesticks standing before the God of the whole earth. The figurative meaning will be found by finding some passage where two trees are mentioned in the interpretation given—such ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... Johnson 'in one night composed, after finishing an evening in Holborn, his Hermit of Teneriffe.' Gent. Mag. for 1784, p. 901. The high value that he set on this piece may be accounted for in his own words. 'Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgment of his own works.... What has been produced without toilsome efforts is considered with delight, as a proof of vigorous faculties and fertile invention.' Johnson's Works, vii. 110. He had said much the same thirty years earlier ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... The Traditional ordinances of fasting are, hastening to break the fast,[FN226] deferring the fore-dawn meal[FN227] and abstaining from speech, save for good works and for calling on the name of God and reciting the Koran.' (Q.) 'What things vitiate not the fast?' (A.) 'The use of unguents and eye-powders and the dust of the road and the swallowing of one's spittle and the emission of seed in dreams of dalliance or at the sight of a strange woman and cupping and letting blood; none ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... in this letter, "on the happy prospect of some considerable step at least being taken, towards the abolition of a traffic, which is not only impious in itself, but of all others tends most to vitiate the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... dough-face 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... alarm the judicial construction of statutes and the Constitution itself, which all but vitiate and annul the basis of our citizenship; we have seen repeated attempts made to discredit the War amendments to the national Constitution, and some have in all seriousness gone so far even as to question their constitutionality. Every student of our common law has always ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the precaution taken to insure the safe delivery of these credentials: it is sufficient to state that they were never submitted to Federal inspection; nor had I ever, at any time, in my possession, a single document which could vitiate my claim to the rights of a neutral and civilian. Even Mr. Seward did not pretend to refuse liberty of unexpressed sympathy with either side to an utter foreigner. While I was a free agent in the Northern States, I was careful ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... unfairness, that this is in great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy for the shallowest ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... inadvertence which, as I presume to think, has led Professor Huxley thus to misconceive secondary qualities, is an inattention to the differences between our ideas, or mental pictures, and the originals whereof those pictures are copies, which seems to me seriously to vitiate his reasoning with regard to primary qualities. With admirable perspicuity he shows[34] how it is that our notions of primary qualities are formed; how the mind, by localising on distinct points of the sensory surface of the body its various, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... videbla. Visibly videble. Vision (sense) vido. Vision (apparition) aperajxo. Visit viziti. Visiting-card vizitkarto. Visitor vizitanto. Visor viziero. Visual vida. Vital vivema. Vital necesega. Vitality vivemo. Vitiate difekti. Vitreous vitreca. Vitrify vitrigi. Vitriol vitriolo. Vivacity viveco. Vivid (color) hela. Vivifying viviga. Vixen vulpino. Viz nome, tio estas, t.e. Vizier veziro. Vocabulary ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes |
