"Nugatory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brother's claim. So far as my utter want of all legal knowledge would allow me to decide, I could perceive nothing in the will itself which would admit of a lawyer's successful cavil: my reasons for suspicion, so conclusive to myself, would seem nugatory to a judge. My uncle was known as a humourist; and prove that a man differs from others in one thing, and the world will believe that he differs from them in a thousand. His favour to me would be, in the popular ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... legatine powers over the whole of Scotland, instead of over his own province of the archdiocese, so as to render nugatory the exemption granted to the king's old tutor and favourite prelate the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... shown in his treatment of the earlier witnesses. The coloured man, Harry Jones, had died in hospital, but Mr. Booth, the proprietor of the Wagtail, Baldwin Meadows, Mr. Dawes, and the man who was stabbed in the wrist, all gave evidence of a rather nugatory character. Lowes-Parlby could do nothing with it. The findings of this Special Inquiry do not concern us. It is sufficient to say that the witnesses already mentioned all returned to Wapping. The man who had received the thrust of a hatpin through his wrist did not think it advisable ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... manor-house. Compared with his possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the possession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal: ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... native soil, and all That once they deemed life's sweetest, at thy call; Fled over burning plains; in deserts fainted; Wearied for months at sea—yet ever painted Thee as the shining Mecca, that to gain Invalidated pain, Cured the sick soul—made nugatory evil ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... knows what the defence is to be until the defendant himself takes the stand, and, by "waiving further examination" in the police court, the astute criminal attorney may select at his leisure the defence best suited to fit in with and render nugatory the prosecution's evidence. ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... the most luxuriant language, void of ideas. He calls their unmeaning verbosity "anemone-words;" for anemonies are flowers, which, however brilliant, only please the eye, leaving no fragrance. Pratt, who was a writer of flowing but nugatory verses, was compared to the daisy; a flower indeed common enough, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the King, which I thought at the time a particularly nugatory and even schoolboy step, and only consented to because I had held the reins so tight over my little band before, has raised a deuce of a row—new proclamation, no one is to interview the sacred puppet without consuls' permission, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... laughing at His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday, and continuing this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the Creator, does? The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory by the very power of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled to choose between the impossibilities with which this God, so dull a jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of humanity argue face to ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... might seem as if this arrangement rendered nugatory the attempt to take advantage of the rise and fall of the buoy; but it is not so when the relations of the four buoys to one another are considered. Although the frame is free to move up and down upon the uprising shaft, still its inclination ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... pre-eminent degree, conduct waits on intelligence. Deep will only answer unto deep; and great characters only come with much meditation on the things that are highest. And, on the other hand, the misconstruction of life's meaning flings man back upon himself, and makes his action nugatory. Byronism was driven "howling home again," says the poet. The universe will not be interpreted in terms of sense, nor be treated as carrion, as Carlyle said. There is no rest in the "Everlasting No," because it is a wrong view of man and of the world. Or rather, the negative is not ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... novel one. But the resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to take their determination while a school remained for which ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... would be cutting off the future and its consequences from those whose real hopes and fears ought to be mainly concentrated in the life that is to come, it would seem to be presuming to suppose that principles like these ever can be nugatory in the control even of our ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... December. Then, for another week, the strange phenomenon, day after day, of that whirl of popular and army opinion which was to render all the long debate over the new Constitution nugatory, to upset the Wallingford-House administration, and stop Whitlocke in his issue of the writs for the Parliament that had just been announced. Monk's dogged persistency for the old Rump had done the work without the need of his advance from Coldstream ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Church-membership ought to bring with him to the study of the sacred Scriptures as the master-key of interpretation. Whatever the doctrine of infallible dictation may be in itself, in THEIR hands it is to the last degree nugatory, and to be paralleled only by the Romish tenet of Infallibility—in the existence of which all agree, but where, and in whom, it exists stat adhuc sub lite. Every sentence found in a canonical Book, rightly interpreted, contains the dictum of an infallible Mind; but what the right interpretation ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... an injured air that he was not so young as he was, and that, if I wanted him to survive the summer, I had better keep my ears open, while, to judge from his behaviour, the reflection that his recent output of vigour had been rendered nugatory by my unreadiness was hurrying Mr. Dunkelsbaum into the valley of insanity. Purple in the face from the unwonted violence of his physical and mental exercise, streaming with perspiration and shaking with passion, the fellow stormed and ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory. Religious training must be specific at first, and, omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith the earlier may ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... is, in the first place, that such a subject does not belong to the treaty-making power; and any such arrangement would have been nugatory. And, in the second place, by no admissible construction can the guaranty be carried further than the protection of property in slaves at that time in the ceded territory. And this has been complied with. The organization of the slave States of Louisiana, Missouri, and ...
— 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
... cries, 'If Chatterton had had a great work to do by living, he would have lived!' Others retort on the critic, 'On the same principle, why did Keats, whom you rate so high, perish so early?' The question altogether is nugatory, seeing it can never be settled. Suffice it that these songs and rhymes of Chatterton have great beauties, apart from the age and position of their author. There may at times be madness, but there is ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... ten o'clock, Gen'l Darrington was murdered. His vault was forced open, money was stolen, and most significant of all, the WILL was abstracted. Criminal jurisprudence holds that the absence of motive renders nugatory much weighty testimony. In this melancholy cause, could a more powerful motive be imagined than that which goaded the prisoner to dip her fair hands in her grandfather's blood, in order to possess and destroy that will, which stood as an everlasting barrier between ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of time these just prescriptions have been rendered nugatory in great part, as regards the native Jews, by the legislation and municipal regulations of Roumania. Starting from the arbitrary and controvertible premises that the native Jews of Roumania domiciled ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... which marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the preoccupation with other issues, were it only turning over a leader in the morning's Dominion, that carried him along indifferent to the allurements I have described. The family had a bond of union in their respect for Lorne, and this absence of nugatory inclinations in him was among its elements. Even Stella who, being just fourteen, was the natural mouthpiece of family sentiment, would declare that Lorne had something better to do than go hanging about after girls, and for her part she thought ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to the meaning, say they, an immediate inference does not really express any new judgment; the fact expressed by it is either the same as its evidence, or is even less significant. If from No men are gods we prove that No gods are men, this is nugatory; if we prove from it that Some men are not gods, this is to emasculate the sense, to waste valuable information, to lose the commanding sweep ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... received; in other words, it belongs to Congress only to go to War. But when a foreign nation declares or openly and avowedly makes war upon the United States, they are then by the very fact already at war, and any declaration on the part of Congress is nugatory; it is at least unnecessary."[1221] Apparently Congress shared the view that a formal declaration of war was unnecessary. It enacted a statute which authorized the President to instruct the commanders of armed vessels of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow students is not only bad counsel,—and bad counsel for the result, as well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory,—but also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel—a counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... commissioners would only agree that there should be no further confiscations and prosecutions, and that congress should recommend the several states to revise their laws concerning them. These articles were nugatory. Nothing short of a renewal of the war could have induced the Americans to forego their revenge, and if the war had gone on longer, the loyalists' fate would have been no better. Everywhere, with the exception of South Carolina, they ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... idea of the doctrines of grammar was judicious. He attempted no broad innovation on what had been previously taught; for he had neither the vanity to suppose he could give currency to novelties, nor the folly to waste his time in labours utterly nugatory. By turning his own abilities to their best account, he seems to have done much to promote and facilitate the study of our language. But his notion of grammatical authorship, cuts off from it all pretence ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... me might have evinced it, on trial, of superior virtue and wisdom, namely, the element of time, indefinite time as a factor in the work of reconstruction. But it is impossible to speak positively on this point. His scheme was rejected and all discussion of it becomes therefore nugatory. ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... represented by the wearying flight of the camel across the desert, treachery and hostility to his plans, if not his person, among his colleagues—all these difficulties and dangers overcome and rendered nugatory by the earnestness and energy of one man alone. Well might his indignation find vent in such a grand outburst ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... his supporters in the capital, which enabled him to predict the course events would take if he obeyed the summons of Cassius. Had such communications reached him, he might have known that the projected investigation would be nugatory. But a failure in the purpose for which he was summoned could convey no benefit to Jugurtha or his supporters; it would simply incense the people and place both the king, and his friends amongst the nobility, in a worse position than before. The course of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the powers with which they are connected; because the attempt to exercise those powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendor of ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... there will soon be as little of the non ego left as there is of the ego with their opponents. Both, however, are so far agreed as that we know not where to draw the line between the two, and this renders nugatory any system which is founded upon a ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... General Swayne's good intentions are nugatory from the want of faith on the part of those to whom ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... calculations may appear very promising upon paper, but when applied to real life they will be found to be absolutely nugatory. Mr Condorcet allows that a class of people which maintains itself entirely by industry is necessary to every state. Why does he allow this? No other reason can well be assigned than that he conceives that ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... voluntary Committee. When the Confederation was completed, which was only, be it remembered, on March 1, 1781, it was still, as Washington wrote in 1785, 'little more than a shadow without a substance, and the Congress a nugatory body;' or, as it was described by a late writer, 'powerless for government, and a rope of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... was not in earnest in the desire for knowledge and wisdom: he grasped with avidity at a popular objection, or a sceptical argument, without desiring to understand or master the principles which rendered them nugatory; and he was ignorant and untaught enough to fancy that the very foundations of religion were shaken if he could attack the authenticity of some Jewish miracle, or impugn the genuineness ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... penny-a-liner, whether ancient or modern, who reflects the whims and humors, the enthusiasms and weaknesses, of the public in unguarded moments. Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be interesting ourselves in other quite as nugatory matters if these were denied us? In one respect, and no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion of news and the universal interest in it have affected the national thought and character. The whole people have ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... support of no advantage. It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe. The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or nugatory in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the Pittsburgh bond are still more palpably rendered nugatory by contradictions, manifold evasions and ambiguous phrases; such as "accepted manuals, our fathers' covenants," etc.; while the solemn pledge to "maintain Christian friendship with pious men of every name, and to feel and act ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... of the section, and the residue would secure to the citizen every right which is now secured, excepting the political rights of voting and holding office. If the clause in question does not secure those political rights, it is entirely nugatory, and might as well have ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was dressing for dinner, it occurred to him—it was not for the first time—that, after all, it would take very little to render Rainham's bungling devotion, and his own meritorious aberrations from the path of truth, worse than nugatory. For what if Kitty should split?—so he elegantly expressed his fears—what if the girl, of whom he had heard nothing since the day of that deplorable scene, should break loose, and throw up the part which she had undertaken upon such ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... effect, was followed by another, in which the depreciation was increased to ten per cent. The payments of the bank were at the same time restricted to one hundred livres in gold, and ten in silver. All these measures were nugatory to restore confidence in the paper, though the restriction of cash payments within limits so extremely narrow kept up the credit ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... the authority of his high position, that in cases where the civil power was unable to restrain arson and outrage, it was the duty of all persons, civil as well as military, to use all means in their power to deal with the danger. The reading of the Riot Act was nugatory in such exceptional conditions, and it became the duty of the military to attack the rioters. Thus supported, the King ordered Wedderburn to write at once to Lord Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief, authorizing him to employ the military without waiting for authority from the civil ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... opened the way for, there was slightingly prefixed, under the title 'Testimonies of Authors,' some straggle of real documents, which, now that I find it again, sets the matter into clear light and sequence;—and shall here, for removal of idle stumbling-blocks and nugatory guessings from the path of every reader, be reprinted as it ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... States. He met it very manfully in some respects, defended his action resolutely, but in so doing was led to make such concessions of principle and to attach such an interpretation to the bill as would have rendered it practically nugatory—a thing to keep the promise of peace to the ear and break ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... line of advance was now too dangerous to retreat by. The only alternative was to make a circuit round the bigger of the two buildings—and an interminable circuit it seemed—and all the while I knew my compass-course 'south-east' was growing nugatory. I passed a padlocked door, two corners, and faced the void of fog. Out came the compass, and I steadied myself for the sum. 'South-east before—I'm farther to the eastward now—east will about do'; and off I went, with an error of four ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... two or three leagues away. Again there was nothing to eat but dry biscuit, and as a consequence of their brief, disturbed rest and the lack of something to warm their stomachs the men were weak as cats. Any attempt to enforce discipline on the march that morning was again rendered nugatory by the manner ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... regulating and limiting slavery. The shameful extermination of the native races of the West Indies is a long, sad history of kindly intentions and wise regulations on the part of the home government, made nugatory by the determined self-interest and heartless cruelty of the colonists. [Footnote: Lea, "The Indian Policy of Spain" (in Yale Review, August, 1899); Bourne, Spain in America, chap. xviii.] The fervor of Las Casas could readily obtain from the Spanish monarchs proclamations declaring ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... evening; and though the words he had spoken were still sweet in her ears,—so sweet that she could not endure the thought of abandoning their sweetness,—still she had a misgiving that they were in some sort rendered nugatory by his great fault. She had forgiven the fault;—looking back at it now over the distance of eight or ten days, had forgiven it with all her heart; but still there remained with her an undefined ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... spite of Godoy's opposition, accepted the title of a French admiral. By the treaty of San Ildefonso an offensive alliance against Great Britain was concluded, her commerce to be excluded from Portugal; Louisiana and Florida going to France. All the clauses except this last were nugatory because of Spanish weakness, but Bonaparte put in the plea for compensation to the Spanish Bourbons by some grant of Italian territory to the house of Parma. As we have elsewhere indicated, their attack on Austria in central Europe was a failure, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... obtaining satisfactory preparations showing the cilia, and the discovery that these motile organs are not formed on all substrata, or are only developed during short periods of activity while the organism is young and vigorous, render this character almost nugatory. For instance, B. megatherium and B. subtilis pass in a few hours after commencement of growth from a motile stage with peritrichous cilia, into one of filamentous growth preceded by casting of the cilia. (2) By far the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... end. Implicit trust in the immutability of species is then restored, and the more insensible the shades from one extreme to the other, in a word, the more complete the evidence of transition, the more nugatory does the argument derived from it appear. It then simply resolves itself into one of those exceptional instances of what is called a ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... of the life of Dee was "bound in shallows and in miseries." Queen Elizabeth we may suppose soon found that her dreams of immense wealth to be obtained through his intervention were nugatory. Yet would she not desert the favourite of her former years. He presently began to complain of poverty and difficulties. He represented that the revenue of two livings he held in the church had been withheld from him from the time of his going abroad. He stated ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... your answer is that he does not respect oaths. Then why subject him to the test of oaths? The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why, then, he respects them. Turn which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are; but no eel in the well-sanded fist of a cook-maid, upon the eve of being skinned, ever twisted and writhed as an orthodox parson does when he is compelled by the ...
— English Satires • Various
... if "one" is not an addition to "being," "one" and "being" must have the same meaning. But it would be nugatory to call "being" by the name of "being"; therefore it would be equally so to call being "one." Now this is false. Therefore "one" ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... bishop need not specify in what points the clerk is deficient, but only allege that he is deficient[g]: for the statute 9 Edw. II. st. 1. c. 13. is express, that the examination of the fitness of a person presented to a benefice belongs to the ecclesiastical judge. But because it would be nugatory in this case to demand the reason of refusal from the ordinary, if the patron were bound to abide by his determination, who has already pronounced his clerk unfit; therefore if the bishop returns the clerk to be minus sufficiens in ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... objected, that the article of the act of admission into the Union, by which slavery should be excluded from Missouri, would be nugatory, as the new State in virtue of its sovereignty would be at liberty to revoke its consent, and annul the article by ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... little thought that there were about five hundred orders from the admiralty tacked on to them, which, like the numerous codicils of some wills, contained the most important matter, and to a certain degree make the will nugatory. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... matter of fact there existed no juridical ground for this expectation, and the sentiments of the peoples of the four Christian nations, even while they fought together against the Moslem, were saturated with such an infusion of suspicion and hostility as to render nugatory any programme of Balkan confederation. An alliance had indeed been concluded between Greece and Bulgaria in May, 1912, but it was a defensive, not an offensive alliance. It provided that in case Turkey attacked either of these states, the other should ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which "The Doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course "The Doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... It is easy to impute motives, and difficult to disprove them. I thought, considering his enmity, that he let us off cheap; as there is no punishing a chancellor, and he might say what he pleased with impunity. I did not therefore roar, I only smiled. The effect will be nugatory. Not one in a thousand will read it; those who do, know it refers to a person not in this world; and of those, those who knew my father will not believe it, those who did not will care little about it, and forget ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... breaking open his master's desk and running away with five or six thousand rix-dollars, was only sentenced to forty days' confinement on bread and water; and this slight punishment his relations rendered nugatory by supplying him ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Non-Intercourse measures, still in effect against France, by the action of the British Navy, which should be authorized to capture American vessels seeking to enter ports forbidden them by the Non-Intercourse Act. Canning justly remarked that otherwise Non-Intercourse would be nugatory; there would be nothing to prevent Americans from clearing for England or Spain and going to Holland or France. This was perfectly true. Not only had a year's experience of the embargo so demonstrated, but a twelvemonth later[287] Gallatin had to admit that "the summary of destinations ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... referred to as "frankly admitting that the doctrine of the evolution of species is accepted by three-fourths of the scientific men," and that this doctrine has, in their minds, "rendered nugatory the hypothesis of a vital immaterial principle as a causal factor in the phenomena of life and mind." Allowing this statement its full force, it is still true that none but Atheists can possibly be included in the "three-fourths." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Wylder's writing—I'll swear to it. What on earth can he mean? He can't possibly want to confuse us upon dates, as well as places, because that would simply render his letters, for purposes of business, nugatory, and there are many things ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the house of commons useless. For my part, I am far from thinking this so bold a step as by some it may be imagined. Was not Rome a free state, though it had no house of commons? Has not the British house of commons been incessantly exclaimed upon, as corrupt and nugatory? Has not a reform respecting them been called for from all quarters of the kingdom? I am much of opinion in the present case, that that is the most effectual reform, which goes to the root. Rome had her hereditary ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief of the government. The senate, the council of state, the legislative body, and the emperor, are ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... either totally suppressed or grievously mutilated. I can prove that this danger is not chimerical; and I am quite certain that, if the danger be real, the safeguards which my honourable and learned friend has devised are altogether nugatory. That the danger is not chimerical may easily be shown. Most of us, I am sure, have known persons who, very erroneously as I think, but from the best motives, would not choose to reprint Fielding's novels, or Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... formed from the common people, which was armed with foreign muskets and drilled in the western tactics. They went by the name of "irregular troops" (kiheitai), and played no small part in rendering nugatory the efforts of the shogun to "chastise" the daimyo of Choshu in 1865 ...
— Japan • David Murray
... accepted their acts of ratification as a necessary and lawful exercise of their highest function. If they were not States, or were States out of the Union, their consent to a change in the fundamental law of the Union would have been nugatory, and Congress in asking it committed a political absurdity. The judiciary has also given the solemn sanction of its authority to the same view of the case. The judges of the Supreme Court have included the Southern States in their circuits, and they ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... In the first instance I had no intention of extending the disease further than my own family, but the very extensive influence which the conviction of its efficacy in resisting the smallpox has had upon the minds of the people in general has rendered that intention nugatory, as you will perceive, by the continuation of my cases enclosed in this letter, [Footnote: Doctor Marshall has detailed these cases with great accuracy, but their publication would now be deemed superfluous.—E.J.] by which ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... select committees in certain parliamentary elections which have taken place in that country, and it is impossible to glance at them without being impressed with the conviction that, if any description of franchise depend solely on the oaths of the holders, every species of enquiry will be nugatory; and it will be just as wise to establish at once a system of universal suffrage, as to establish a system of franchise in such a manner. These corporations, thus formed by persons holding a franchise of this description, acquired solely by their own swearing, and without any evidence ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... that every improvement made in it was neutralised by the steep gradients which the new school of engineers were setting it to overcome. On one occasion, when Robert Stephenson stated before a Parliamentary Committee that every successive improvement in the locomotive was being rendered virtually nugatory by the difficult and almost impracticable gradients proposed on many of the new lines, his father, on his leaving the witness-box, went up to him, and said, "Robert, you never spoke truer words than those in all ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... done, and usually results in nothing but litigation. You see for yourself how absurd it would be to treat a paper drawn or executed after a will was made as part of it, for that would render the requirements of the statute nugatory." ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the people and the confidence of the army, without which it was utterly impossible to undertake anything effective. The rest had reckoned with so much certainty upon him that his unexpected defection rendered the whole meeting nugatory. They therefore separated without coming to a determination. All who had met in Dendermonde were expected in the council of state in Brussels; but Egmont alone repaired thither. The regent wished to sift him on the subject of this conference, but she could extract nothing further ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... dictionary of this language, performed a great service for scholarship. In the late Jewish work, the Cabbala, he believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The extravagance of his interpretations of Scriptual passages, based on this, not only rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of trouble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to be ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... abuses practiced by the corporation for its private ends and in violation of its duty to the public? The power of displacing the public directors and that of issuing a scire facias and of removing the deposits were not intended to be idle and nugatory provisions without the means of enforcement. Yet they must be wholly inoperative and useless unless there be some means by which the official conduct of the public directors and the abuses of power on the part of the corporation may be brought to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... and easily understood—as the reader may convince himself if he will turn to the account which I have given of them in the Foundation of Morality, Sec. 17, and in my chief work, bk. i., Sec. 62. But at the sound of certain words, like Right, Freedom, the Good, Being—this nugatory infinitive of the cupola—and many others of the same sort, the German's head begins to swim, and falling straightway into a kind of delirium he launches forth into high-flown phrases which have no meaning whatever. He takes the most remote and empty conceptions, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... one substituted similar to what I have mentioned in this work as being the scheme of Dr. Lang. One of the first acts of the new government was to sweep away the trite and cumbersome machinery of the old system, by making nugatory the existing law of the parent colony, and to pass an act which, for liberality, perhaps stands unequalled. Its main features are—for pastoral purposes—occupation and settlement, with right of tenure, subject to a rental ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... more than that some of the king's predecessors have been called to the throne by some sort of choice, and therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his people. Thus, by a miserable subterfuge, they hope to render their proposition safe by rendering it nugatory. They are welcome to the asylum they seek for their offence, since they take refuge in their folly. For, if you admit this interpretation, how does their idea of election differ from our idea of inheritance? And how does the settlement of the crown in the Brunswick line, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... now we did not have an enlightened public sentiment at the North to help the best part of the Southern people in effecting reformations and improving the laws and regulations. Now, the Northern influence is wholly nugatory, or positively adverse. The opinions and feelings of calm and candid neighbors and friends have great influence. This the South does not enjoy. The North is her passionate reprover; she is held to be, by many, her avowed enemy. In resistance, and in retaliation, compromises ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Mediator be restricted to them. There seems no evading this inference. To give the designed objects of the Saviour's atonement a greater extension than the covenant of grace, is to nullify its character as the stipulated condition of the covenant, and to render nugatory and unavailing the consolatory address by which the heart of many an awakened sinner has been soothed. 'Behold the blood of ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham |
