"Birthright" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be all-unworthy. Who blames her? Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other,—something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not: a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright. What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hope to make the hills of heaven ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Norseman's pride, And Steig-Thorer was on his side. Young Hakon from the Upland came, With royal birth, and blood, and name. Young Hakon from the king demands His royal birthright, half the lands; Magnus will not the kingdom break,— The whole or nothing ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... once have imagined another reason for the laying of that round, good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than pure drowsiness from lack of work-day interest! Yet there was a human soul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as a mountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middle seas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and star!—nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... social science, philosophy, and theology, just as really as for medicine. An adequate knowledge of any history demands more than the study of its last page. The zooelogist has been remiss in not claiming his birthright, and in this respect has sadly failed to follow the path pointed ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... thine, fair princess! fallen to this servile state, Wife and son rule not their actions, others rule their hapless fate! Thy Yudhishthir sold his birthright, sold thee at the impious play, And the wife falls with the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... dominated his tiny person? Only the exquisite soft, pale brown of his satiny skin called loudly and insistently that he was of a race older than the composite English could ever boast; it was the hallmark of his ancient heritage—the birthright of his ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Embassadour, he gaue me his hand and swore he had no more hearts but one, and I should haue halfe of it, in that I so inhanced his obscured reputation. One thing, quoth he, my sweete Jacke I will intreate thee (it shalbe but one) that though I am wel pleased thou shouldest be the ape of my birthright, (as what noble man hath not his ape & his foole) yet that thou be an ape without a clog, not carrie thy curtizan with thee. I tolde him that a king could do nothing without his treasury, this curtizan was my purs-bearer, my countenance and supporter. My earldome I would sooner resigne than part ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... diligently, lest any one come short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and the many be thereby defiled; (16)lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one meal sold his birthright. (17)For ye know that he also afterward, when he wished to inherit the blessing, was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, though he sought ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... might of the fortunate isle to which we turned our eyes, part and parcel of my inheritance, formidable with the courage of my countrymen, humming with my native speech—and as foreign to my purposes as if I had forfeited forever my birthright in her protection. I had drifted into a sort of outlaw. You may not break the king's peace and be made welcome on board a king's ship. You may not hope to make use of a king's ship for the purposes of an elopement. There was no room on board that seventy-four ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending rigor with which he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the Declaration of Independence. His unmerciful logic made the black before the law less than a slave; it reduced him to the status of a horse or dog, a bale of dry-goods or a block of stone. Against such a debasement of any living ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... been the cradle of humanity, the Temperate Zone has been the cradle and school of civilization. Here Nature has given much by withholding much. Here man found his birthright, the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... how I lay and sobbed In my poor cradle—deeply, deeply cursing The rich man's pampered bantling, who had robbed My only birthright—an attentive nursing! Sometimes in hatred of my foster-brother, I gnashed my ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Crawford, he would receive at intervals such information as pertained to that position. For the old man was just in his anger; it never seemed possible to him to deprive Colin of the right of his heritage. To be the 13th Laird of Crawford was Colin's birthright; he fully recognized his title to the honor, and, as the future head of the house, ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... our homes." (Loud applause.) "Too long have our forefathers lived under the yoke of the oppressor. Too long have our old been buried in paupers' graves afther lives of misery no other counthry in the wurrld can equal. Why should it be the lot of our people—men and women born to a birthright of freedom? Why? Are ye men of Ireland so craven that aliens can rule ye as they once ruled the negro?" ("No, no!") "The African slave has been emancipated and his emancipation was through the blood and tears of the people who wronged him. Let OUR emancipation, ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... wandering, That slept within the blood, awakes; For then the summer and the spring I fain would meet by streams and lakes; But ah, my Birthright long is sold, But custom chains me, link on link, And I must get me, as of old, Back to my tools, ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... whence Christ had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the sacred earth, while all the time, within their breasts and brains, the spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of freedom which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Evellin's situation! Ruined by his own rashness, and restrained from a step, to which impatience of present suffering had long impelled him, namely to throw himself on the King's mercy, and either regain his birthright or forfeit his life! He was now a husband; he expected to be a father. Isabel must not be deserted in the hour of distress, and her life was bound up in his. She endured the change in her prospects with a cheerful serenity, that seemed as if she felt only ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... on, no one could deny that the child was puny, that his birthright of health was dwindling fast. And, while it dwindled, the heat came on, and then the stifling dog days. It was a season when the lustiest of children wilted with the damp, depressing heat; and the Brenton baby, never lusty, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... address, and hear in it those expressions of devotion to Her Majesty the Queen, which indicate the feelings which rise so truly in the hearts of every man, woman, and child in Canada, and which not only prove the natural impulses of all who enjoy the birthright of British citizens, but demonstrate the convictions of a people who, by the knowledge they have acquired of the political institutions of the world, cling with a tenacity and firmness never to be shaken, to the constitution which their fathers moulded, and under which they experience now ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... it from her?" he questioned, his innate sense of honor recoiling from everything that seemed dishonorable. "No," he continued, sternly, "it is not hers—she has no right whatever to it; it belongs to Mona alone, for it is the proof of her birthright. I will take it directly to Mr. Corbin, and I will not even tell Mona until I have first confided ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... merely indifferent. Southern statesmen were beginning to echo Calhoun's definition of it as "a positive good." On the top of this came Taney's decision making the right to own slaves a fundamental part of the birthright of an American citizen. This was much more important than the most drastic Fugitive Slave Law, for it indicated a ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... the peasants, the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices—from all this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to establish: 'Man has a birthright of happiness.' These thoughts are my god, a god which will give bread, rest, bliss, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the Red King died, His father wasted in his pride, For it is God's command Who doth another's birthright rive, The curse unto his blood shall cleave, And God's ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... doth pine, Where'er one man may help another,— Thank God for such a birthright, brother,— That spot of earth is thine and mine! There is the true man's birthplace grand, His is a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... man what he found in nature. It was to him a power of good, a world of teaching, a strength of life. He knew that nature was not his, and that his enjoyment of nature was given to him that he might give it to man. It was the birthright ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... after coming home from Queen's; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joy of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... be an exception to the rule. Esau having been born a few moments before his brother Jacob, under the operation of this rule would be the successor to the Abrahamic promise and heir to his father. His birthright, therefore, would include the promise made to Abraham. But the Lord clearly indicated that there should be an exception to the rule in this case and that Jacob should be the heir and not Esau. When it was known that the mother would bear two sons, and just before the time of their ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... White men have frequently enrolled themselves as warriors among the American Indians; but they have rarely gained the full confidence of the Indians, who, naturally very proud of their birthright, view with ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... mankind. And I am then in such a beatific state of mind that I would share with all mankind my sack of lentils and my pipkin of olive oil. I wonder not at Esau's extravagance, when he saw a steaming mess of it. For what is a birthright in comparison?" ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to win it back—and more also." He looked round desperately. "Anybody want a birthright? For two hundred and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... my own birthright, lowly though it be. No one will attempt to pull me down. I shall have no ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... possessions where their forefathers hewed the wood, and drew the water for ours. But in the thicket of the wilderness, and in the mist of the mountain, Kenneth, son of Eracht, keep thou unsoiled the freedom which I leave thee as a birthright. Barter it not neither for the rich garment, nor for the stone-roof, nor for the covered board, nor for the couch of down—on the rock or in the valley, in abundance or in famine—in the leafy summer, and in the days of the iron winter—Son of the Mist! be ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... evil money!" said the chief to himself; "it was the sale of a birthright for a mess of pottage! I would have turned it back into the right channel, the good of my people! but after all, what can money do? It was discontent with poverty that began the ruin of the highlands! If the heads of the people had but lived pure, active, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... in the birthright of successive generations; our ignorance of the origin and purport of all existence; of the outcome of life on this earth; of the conditions of consciousness; slow progress of evolution and its system of ruthless routine; man is the heir ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... first, and it got so that a procession of white-faced, wailing babies began to appear to her in the dead of night and cry for her to help them; to give them a chance to breathe in the stifling midnight, a chance to claim their birthright of clean water and air and sun. And she added, 'When you get to seeing things at night you're ready ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... pleasant side of society, which is so persistent and so deluding where money is concerned, to have been in the run of big affairs not because one has created them, but because one is a part of them and because they are one's birthright, like the air one breathes, could not help but create one of those illusions of solidarity which is apt to befog the clearest brain. It is so hard for us to know what we have not seen. It is so difficult for us ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one habituated to require subservience and to take no thought for the morrow, is the birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than that, for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of superior worth, before which the base-born commoner delights ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Vishnu, bearing shell, and mace, And discus, showed his radiant face, And thus addressed in smiling glee The Trident wielding deity: "What treasure first the Gods upturn From troubled Ocean, as they churn, Should—for thou art the eldest—be Conferred, O best of Gods, on thee. Then come, and for thy birthright's sake, This venom as thy first fruits take." He spoke, and vanished from their sight, When Siva saw their wild affright, And heard his speech by whom is borne The mighty bow of bending horn,(204) The poisoned flood at once he ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... money of L20,000, but the house near Bath, and the land, he left to Diana. I am bound to say that Lydia behaved very well in this matter, as she could have had all the money and land, but she was content with the assurance money, and did not rob Diana Vrain of her birthright. Yet Diana hated her, and still hates her; but I ask any one who reads this confession if my dear Lyddy is not the better woman of the two? Who dares to say that such a sweet girl is guilty of the crimes ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... their birthright, And crosier and crown pass away Like phantasms that flit o'er the marshes At the glance of the clean, white day. And then from the lava of AEtna To the ice of the Alps let there be One freedom, one faith without fetters, One ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... Despair at bay. It was the bravest stand that thou hast ever made. And now, if thou hast lived through this one day, why not another? 'Tis only one hour at a time that thou art called on to endure. Come! By the bloodstone that is thy birthright, pledge me anew thou'lt keep thy oath until the going down of one ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... this journey of 800 miles are very small, except Birmingham and Bristol, and the life of religion is low among the members in general; which is not much to be wondered at, when we consider that many of those meetings are constituted [chiefly] of a few individuals who have had a birthright in the Society—born members but not new-born Christians, without the power or form of religion, no outward means to excite them to faith and good works. If they neglect the spirit of prayer in themselves, it is not surprising they should grow cold ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... indeed, great, but their souls are greater." Caesar had a remarkable method of eulogizing his own generalship by praising the valor and strength of the vanquished foes. "Liberty," wrote Lucanus, "is the German's birthright." And Florus, speaking of liberty, said: "It is a privilege which nature has granted to the Germans, and which the Greeks, with all of their arts, knew not how to obtain." At a later period Montesquieu ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... last days of August the baby was born. Denasia recovered rapidly, but the little lad was a sickly, puny child. He had been wasted by fever, and fretted by anxious cares and by many fears, even before they were his birthright. All the more he appealed to his mother's love, and Denasia began now to comprehend something of the sin against mother-love which she herself ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... insincerity about it. But because "all that glitters is not gold," it does not follow that nothing which glitters is gold. Because a statement is general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical. "Glittering generality" or not, the voice which proclaimed that the birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the fiat lux of the new-born political universe. This, and the terrible series of logical consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties, menacing all the hierarchies, undermining ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... have they missed whose pulses are never stirred by the Spirit of Romance! Content and Peace of Mind may be had by all who will offer up sacrifices to obtain them; but Imagination is not to be had at any price unless it be a part of our birthright. Content may yield a tranquillity of mind that refreshes the soul, but it is Imagination alone that can produce that spiritual exaltation which takes our minds from worldly things, carries us backwards or forwards through countless ages of the past or aeons of futurity, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to the left, and is liable to a due responsibility for his words and actions, still the Just Judge alone can and must make allowance for the innate inclinings of heredity and the outward influences of circumstance, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... have his head. God is leading him straight on the path of failure. It is this still-vague feeling, that he will never have power to add to the Prussian birthright, that makes him rush feverishly from one scheme to another; stirring up this question and that, ever testing, ever striving. It is this foreboding that has driven him to pursue fame, fortune and glory, and so to weary them with his importunities and haste, that they flee ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... of their existence, little recked that she had been weighed, judged, and condemned. Her old dream had come true. Society, the society which should have been her birthright and was not, had thrown open its doors to her at last and everybody was outdoing everybody else in flattering and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... found in tyrannous sway the pseudo-classic school of the French David, cold as marble, rigid as petrifaction, spasmodic as a galvanised muscle. But the Germans, especially the more intellectual sort, smarting under the yoke, were all the while gathering strength to reclaim nationality as their birthright. The reaction came through the romantic movement, otherwise the revival of the poetry and the art of the Middle Ages. Overbeck fell under the influence: in his Lubeck home he read Tieck's 'Phantasies on Art,' and thirsted ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... and parted—Letty unaware that she had given her friend a less warm kiss than usual. There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind: Letty was angry with every person and thing at Thornwick, and unkind to her best friend, for whose sake in part she was angry. With glowing cheeks, tear-filled eyes, and indignant heart she set out ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... trunk the filthy excrescences which, like poisonous fungus, suck the sap of honour and of life. The colonel hath had many trials in this life, and much to break down a noble and a proud spirit. In earlier days, a question of birthright, while it cut off one entail, brought on another, which entailed a name, not the ancient gift of a monarch, but one still more ancient, and, according to Dodsley's Chronology of the Kings of England, the origin of British sovereignty itself—a 'filius nullius,' a ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... cookery then began to become a science, though luxury had not brought it to the height of an art. Thus we read, that Jacob made such palatable pottage, that Esau purchased a mess of it at the extravagant price of his birthright. And Isaac, before by his last will and testament he bequeathed his blessing to his son Esau, required him to make some savoury meat, such as his soul loved, i.e., such as was relishable ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow-creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... as Man fancies that Fortune will live, Like a bride with her lover, united with Worth; For her favours, alas! to the mean she will give— And Virtue possesses no title to earth! That Foreigner wanders to regions afar, Where the lands of her birthright immortally are! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... country's highest talent; They, with lesser lights, illumined Our ambition's broad horizon; These and they, our master spirits, Our auspicious hillside leaders, Offspring of the young Lancaster, Hers by birth or by adoption. Strong the cord of native friendship, Firm the bond of common birthright, Binding close the city's children, Linking all her sons together. Waning moons have well attested, Moving cycles, borne the triumphs Of her statesmen and her rulers, Of her public men and heroes. Her municipal directors, Her trustees ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... for you, if you can do it," said Robert, laughing, "but I've gone my limit for the present. Besides, if you gave each of them two hundred acres of the Kingdom of Heaven, it wouldn't stop them from feeling that they had been defrauded of their birthright here." ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of the Tudors and the Stuarts were followed by a crisis when the crown passed from Charles II. to his brother, James II. The new king commenced his administration with a large measure of public good will. He was a prince who had been driven into exile by a faction which had tried to rob him of his birthright, on the ground that he was a deadly enemy to the religion and laws of England. He had triumphed, he was on the throne, and his first act was to declare that he would defend the Church and respect the rights of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... and in might: The rest were long to tell; though far renowned Th' Ionian gods—of Javan's issue held Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth, Their boasted parents;—Titan, Heaven's first-born, With his enormous brood, and birthright seized By younger Saturn: he from mightier Jove, His own and Rhea's son, like measure found; So Jove usurping reigned. These, first in Crete And Ida known, thence on the snowy top Of cold Olympus ruled the middle air, Their highest heaven; or on the Delphian cliff, Or in ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... in this country, save only the Parliament of Ireland; that we humbly conceive that in this right the very essence of our liberty exists, a right which we, on the part of all the people of Ireland, do claim as their birthright, and which we cannot yield but with our lives." The italics are ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... why me—me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... publicly to express our feelings on the subject. We do not consider Africa to be our home, any more than the present whites do England, Scotland, or Ireland. This is the land our fathers have tilled before us; this is the land that gave us our birthright.—The meeting then ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles—an indifferent "yes" or "no"—turn the poised scales of life. For one other day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union, Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at the moment as ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... and so all mortal natures fall Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil; But inspiration cometh from above, And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence She fell; nor human soul, by native worth, Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance, Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth; Until God maketh earth and soul anew; The one like heaven, the other like himself. So shall the new creation come at once; Sin, the dead branch ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Napoleon placed the sacred diadem on his own head and then on the head of Josephine, who knelt to receive it. His aspect was gloomy as he received this symbol of successful ambition, for the mass of the people was silent and he was uneasy at the usurpation of a privilege which was not his birthright. The authority of the Pope had confirmed his audacious action, but he was afraid of the attitude of his army. "The greatest man in the world" Kleber had proclaimed him, after the crushing of the Turks at Aboukir in Egypt. There was work to do before he reached ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... this dreadful creature's character? How could Wilhelmine be wholly innocent of the terribly compromising actions of her daily companion? Did Wilhelmine lack intuition? Was she without that delicate sensitiveness which is the birthright of all nice women? How could a pure girl breathe the miasmic atmosphere which must emanate from the soul of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... hemispheres who are now rejoicing in the triumph of liberal principles, should unite in erecting a monument to perpetuate the memory of ROGER WILLIAMS, the first governor who held liberty of conscience, as well as of person, to be the birthright ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... N. due, dueness; right, privilege, prerogative, prescription, title, claim, pretension, demand, birthright. immunity, license, liberty, franchise; vested interest, vested right. sanction, authority, warranty, charter; warrant &c. (permission) 760; constitution &c. (law) 963; tenure; bond &c. (security) 771. claimant, appellant; plaintiff &c. 938. V. be due &c. adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sneer; I earn, before I eat, my bread and cheese; I love my language; and I like my beer. Content with what I have, so that it come Through honest sources: happy at my lot, I seek not—wish not—for a fairer home. Hard work: my Bible: children: wife: a cot: These are my birthright, these I'll strive to keep, And round my humble hearth affection bind: From Eisteddfodau untold pleasures reap; And try to live at peace with all mankind. Then glad am I that you your error see, Of sneering where you cannot ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... the easiest thing in the world for Mervale, on returning from his Continental episode of life, to settle down to his desk,—his heart had been always there. The death of his father gave him, as a birthright, a high position in a respectable though second-rate firm. To make this establishment first-rate was an honourable ambition,—it was his! He had lately married, not entirely for money,—no! he was worldly rather than ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... individuals received for having surrendered their original liberty to do as they pleased! After all, what would independent initiative have been worth without fire or arrow or earthern kettle, or cow or horse or wheel, or sword and shield? Who would not have forfeited the bare birthright of empty (although healthy) independence for participation in the ever richer conquest over the physical resources ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... wants to realize by faith; that is a possibility, that is a promise, that is my birthright, and I want to have it, and I want by the grace of God to say, "Jesus, I will not rest until Thou hast revealed Thyself fully ...
— 'Jesus Himself' • Andrew Murray
... Terror; he was paralysed with sorrow and dismay, and stung with disappointment, that no paramount spirit had emerged to abash the impious crests of the leaders of 'the atheist crew,' and 'to quell outrage and bloody power,' and to 'clear a passage for just government, and leave a solid birthright to the state.'[30] ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... there are many things I wish were different," the tailor continued in a more thoughtful tone. "Many of my people forget their birthright and force themselves on the Christian, trying to break down the fence which has always divided us, and which is really our best protection. As long as we keep to ourselves we are a power. Persecution,—and sometimes it amounts to that—is better than amalgamation; ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... freedom is being told above, but their chains of death clank in solemn music as the midnight revelry sports with the very agony of their sorrows. Oh! who has made their lives a wanton jest?-can it be the will of heaven, or is it the birthright of a downtrodden race? They look for to-morrow, hope reverberates one happy thought, it may bring some tidings of joy; but again they sink, as that endless gloom rises before them. Hope fades from their feelings, from the bleeding heart for which compassion ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... not born till after the time of Sir Charles, to whom we have before alluded. Others are of opinion that he was a legitimate son of old Lady Magna Charta, although he was long concealed and kept out of his birthright. Certain it is that he was a very benevolent person. Whenever any poor fellow was taken up on grounds which he thought insufficient, he used to attend on his behalf and bail him; and thus he had become so popular, that to take direct measures against him was out ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... leads blind Isaac; Hanan and Zethar, two of his neighbours; Abra, a girl who assists Rebecca; and Debora, an old nurse. Esau and his servant Ragau set forth together on a hunt. While they are gone, Rebecca urges Jacob to secure his brother's birthright. Esau returns with a raging appetite, and Jacob demands his birthright as the condition of relieving him with a mess of rice pottage; he consents, and Ragau laughs at his stupidity, while Jacob, Rebecca, and Abra sing a psalm of thanksgiving. These things occupy the first two Acts; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... a case of love at first blindness since the day when they had tumbled into each other's arms in the same cradle. And Hands-pansy, when he first saw her, did not discover that Nillywill was a real princess hiding her birthright in the home of a poor peasant; nor did Nillywill, when she first saw Hands, see in him the baby-beginnings of the most honest and good heart that ever sprang out of poverty and humble parentage. So from her end of ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty that come and go, gliding as on wings, or, statue-like, stand in the glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... husband still, how shall thy hand be bent To slay me? Nay, if Right be come at last, What shalt thou bring but comfort for pains past, And harbour for a woman storm-driven: A woman borne away by violent men: And this one birthright of my beauty, this That might have been my glory, lo, it is A stamp that God hath burned, of slavery! Alas! and if thou cravest still to be As one set above gods, inviolate, 'Tis but a fruitless longing ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... had striven from the first to awaken thoughts of higher things, and turn remorse into repentance; but every attempt resulted in strange, sad wanderings about Esau, the birthright, and the blessing. Indeed, these might not have been entirely wanderings, for once he said, 'It is better this way, Bill. You don't know what you wish in trying to bring me round. Don't be hard on me. She drove me to it. It is all right now. The ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... great good humour, so that they were quite ready to listen to, and fall in with, the plans of the King, whatever these might be. Of course there were many freeborn noble-spirited udallers who could not thus be tickled into the selling of their birthright; but Harald's tremendous energy and power, coupled with his rigorous treatment of all who resisted him, had the effect of reducing many of these to sullen silence, while some made a virtue of necessity, and accepted the fate which ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... range of spiritual influences; we have let prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship; we have done nothing to keep our soul alive in us. This is how men choose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pure inertia, so that they lose their ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... means of the Public Meetings Act has been a menace to Your Majesty's subjects since the enactment of the Act in 1894. This power has now been applied in order to deliver a blow that strikes at the inherent and inalienable birthright of every British subject—namely, his right to petition his Sovereign. Straining to the utmost the language and intention of the law, the Government have arrested two British subjects who assisted ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... high personal qualities. It was hinted by one that the ancient barony of the Talbots would be revived by the king; and the gratitude of a free and grateful country, with the consciousness of having materially aided in acquiring that independence which should be the birthright of every Englishman, was eloquently portrayed by the other. When to the last plea was added the personal preference of Katharine Wilton, the balance was overcome, and the hopes of the mother were ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of compromise between her conscious intelligence and the traditional prejudice which had in no wise diminished since Martial included, in his picture of a domestic menage, "a wife not too learned..." She is not willing to lose a woman's birthright of love and devotion, but is not quite sure how far it might be affected by her ability to detect a solecism. Hence, she offers a great deal of subtle flattery to masculine self-love. With ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... abominable institution the poorhouse. That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet "pauper" is, to me, the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who are injured, and it is not the "pauper"—oh, inexpressibly wicked word!—it is the well-to-do, who are the criminal classes. It matters not in the least ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... misunderstood Jewish fellows. Now we see, and our younger brothers of the Menorah fellowship have caught the vision, that no Jew can be truly cultured who Jewishly uproots himself, that the man who rejects the birthright of inheritance of the traditions of the earliest and virilest of the cultured peoples of earth is impoverishing his very being. The Jew who is a "little Jew" is ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... that equal liberty was originally the portion, and is still the birthright of all men, and influenced by the strong ties of humanity and the principles of their institution, your memorialists conceive themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bands of slavery, and promote a general enjoyment of the blessings ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... declaration, in which he represents himself as trusting in God, and waiting patiently upon the king's sacred Majesty for his royal writ of summons to call him to appear and take his place and seat according to his birthright and title, "for true men ought not to be blamed for standing up for justice, property, and right, which is the chief diadem in the Crown, and the laurel of the kingdom." That summons never was destined to be issued. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... ideas as to men and women, and she was seemingly incapable of receiving any others. In her mind men were strong and brave, and women weak and timorous; she believed that the first were good to hold on to, and that the last were good to hold on; all this she held by birthright, without ever reasoning upon it or caring ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... forbid. We are not, like Epictetus, slaves, but free men. And we are made in God's image, and have each our spark, however dim, of that creative genius, that power of creating or of altering circumstances, by which God made all worlds; and to use that, is of our very birthright, or what would all education, progress, civilisation be, save rebellion against God? But when we have done our utmost, how little shall we have done! Canst thou,—asks our Lord, looking with loving sadness on the hurry and the struggle of the human anthill—canst ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... but hung his head and was silent. And, thus silent, he heard no more the bewildering music of his youth, but instead there came to his ears the sound of a broken-hearted woman's sobs, and the weeping of children mourning the birthright that had been lost for them in their father's wayward youth. And the ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... from Cleveland on the train Nyoda had watched men who had scarcely taken their eyes from Hinpoha. The guardian sighed as she reflected on the problem, for she knew how difficult it would be for Hinpoha to live out the happy normal girl life which was her birthright. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Noel. "I don't think that I could ever bring myself to do an act like that by which you deprived me of my birthright; but I declare that, if I had the misfortune to do so, I should afterwards have acted as you have. Your rank was too conspicuous to permit a voluntary acknowledgment. It was a thousand times better to suffer an injustice ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... has so abjured his birthright, and forsworn his rank—if this heritage, which is so dangerous from its grandeur, pass, in case of his pardon, to some obscure Englishman—a foreigner—a native of a country that has no ties with ours—a country that is the very refuge of levellers ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... guarantees are our birthright, and I am ready to enforce that inalienable right to the last extent. We can not recognize secession. Recognize it once, and you have not only dissolved government, but you have destroyed social order—upturned the foundations of society. You have ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... dignity was dead in these descendants of the great people who had made the Empire; they had long ago sold their birthright of valour and of honour for the pottage of luxury and the favours of a tyrannical madman. What cared they if after they had feasted and shouted themselves hoarse in praise of a deified brute, the ruins of Rome came crashing down over their graves? What cared they ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... colleagues was Hugh, Count of Vermandois. With him may be placed the Norman duke Robert, whose carelessness had lost him the crown of England, and who had now pawned his duchy for a pittance scarcely less paltry than that for which Esau bartered away his birthright. The number of the great chiefs who led the pilgrims from Northern Europe is completed with the names of Robert, Count of Flanders, and of Stephen, Count of Chartres, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... rose on this dramatic trial which, Boswell declares, "shook the security of birthright in Scotland to its foundation," the Lady Jean, only daughter of James, second Marquess of Douglas, was one of the fairest maids north of the Tweed—a girl who combined beauty and a singular charm of manner with such abounding vitality and strength ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... strangers, and no one appeared inclined to be communicative; even the most indifferent, the most stoical, expressed their ideas in disjointed sentences; they could not but feel that their projects and speculations had been overthrown by a captivity so anomalous with their boasted birthright. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... good-breeding and taste—these were made for woman; they are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for she keeps he birthright and the pottage she earns is ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... about bribery and corruption. It may be a bad thing, but many seem to think otherwise. Much may be said on both sides of the question. Oh! don't tell me of a worm selling his birthright for a mess of pottage: I never read of such worms in Buffon, or even in Pliny. But if they do exist in the human form, the baseness consists in the sale, not in the quid pro quo. A mess of pottage in itself ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... vast majority of mankind with a birthright of normal physical efficiency. It is the duty of those who aspire to be known as social workers each to do his share in confirming his fellow ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... of men, O my God. Kind-hearted men comfort and console those who have suffered injuries and wrongs at our hands, but the kindest-hearted of men harden their hearts and set their faces like a flint against us who have done the wrong. All Syria sympathised with Esau for the loss of his birthright, but I do not read that any one came to whisper one kind word to Jacob on his hard pillow. All the army mourned over Uriah, but all the time David's moisture was dried up like the drought of summer, and not even Nathan came to the King ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte |
