toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

dictum
in a sentence

show 38 more with this conextual meaning
  • The delicacy of his position here, alone and dependent upon the Convention and the dictum familia of the Great Houses, fretted him.†   (source)
  • The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.†   (source)
  • I subscribed to Marx's basic dictum, which has the simplicity and generosity of the Golden Rule: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.†   (source)
  • It was Greer's favorite dictum.†   (source)
  • I don't even remember where I learned that childhood rhyme or the dictum that demanded you scratch your head every time you heard a siren, lest the next siren be for you.†   (source)
  • A huge, red-faced young man of inexhaustible energy, Chase refused to accept the dictum that Maryland's delegates must vote down independence.†   (source)
  • 'Know thyself,' that's my dictum.†   (source)
  • He could not think of an instance when a custom or dictum described in a guidebook had ever been borne out in practice.†   (source)
  • I have heard it said another way, as a dictum: "He who is less than just is less than man."†   (source)
  • Since it is rather inconsequential whether a public school teacher agrees with a dictum passed down from his superintendent or not, my only recourse is to answer you without regard to our positions.†   (source)
  • It was the favorite dictum of the mild little Welsh sergeant at that house near Oxford in the war: "Never use both hands at once, not with a knife, a stick or a pistol; keep your left arm free, and hold it across the belly.†   (source)
  • (Again this is not a moral dictum; it is said rather wistfully, as o f something he is beginning to doubt) WOLSEY (After a pause, rather gently) I believe you believe that.†   (source)
  • "You gotta make me first," I said, remembering Atticus's blessed dictum.   (source)
    dictum = saying
  • Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual—her mother did the same.   (source)
    dicta = sayings
  • Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?   (source)
  • Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.†   (source)
  • Henry Clinton was Jean Louise's own kind, and now she did not consider the dictum particularly harsh.†   (source)
  • DICTUM FAMILIA: that rule of the Great Convention which prohibits the slaying of a royal person or member of a Great House by informal treachery.†   (source)
  • "Facts are stubborn things," he told the jury, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."†   (source)
  • Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr Johnson's dictum concerning, a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music.†   (source)
  • Cottard had always professed very liberal ideas, as his pet dictum on economic questions, "Big fish eat little fish," implied.†   (source)
  • …two trips to Memphis with his father to buy live stock or slaves) and had no time to look at now—Henry who knew yet did not believe, and Bon whom Mr Compson had called a fatalist but who, according to Shreve and Quentin, did not resist Henry's dictum and design for the reason that he neither knew or cared what Henry intended to do because he had long since realised that he did not know yet what he himself was going to do, —four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty…†   (source)
  • '* * He has forgotten his dictum about truth even in jest.†   (source)
  • It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.†   (source)
  • To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl's dictum: "As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined"—this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.†   (source)
  • Apart from her studies Anne expanded socially, for Marilla, mindful of the Spencervale doctor's dictum, no longer vetoed occasional outings.†   (source)
  • For behind his brow were the thoughts or half-thoughts that first conferred true cloying sweetness to his visions and images, thoughts that centered on Madame Chauchat's carelessness and brazenness, on the illness that accentuated and enhanced her body, the illness that embodied her very being and that he now shared with her according to medical dictum.†   (source)
  • …and from this point carrying on the picture of Roberta's life from the time she first left home to join Grace Marr until, having met Clyde on Crum Lake and fallen out with her friend and patrons, the Newtons, because of him, she accepted his dictum that she live alone, amid strange people, concealing the suspicious truth of this from her parents, and then finally succumbing to his wiles—the letters she had written him from Biltz detailing every single progressive step in this story.†   (source)
  • No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure to perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.†   (source)
  • And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her," he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now no weight and no meaning at all.†   (source)
  • Amy Eshton, not hearing or not heeding this dictum, joined in with her soft, infantine tone: "Louisa and I used to quiz our governess too; but she was such a good creature, she would bear anything: nothing put her out.†   (source)
  • Here, in the quiet of Boldwood's parlour, where everything that was not grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity, imbibed from their accessories now.†   (source)
  • For instance when the evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in thorough sympathy with peasant possession as voicing the trend of modern opinion (a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was subsequently partially cured of) and…†   (source)
  • They denounced it in Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain, Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau; and it was no less academic a work than W. C. Brownell's "French Traits" which brought forth, in a London literary journal, the dictum that "the language most depressing to the cultured Englishman is the language of the cultured American."†   (source)
  • "Manners, morals and political views," said the /New York World/, commenting upon this dictum, "have all undergone a standardization which is one of the remarkable aspects of American evolution.†   (source)
  • Of the frivolous Judge—of the corrupt Congressman, Governor, Mayor—of such as these standing helpless and exposed, Of the mumbling and screaming priest, (soon, soon deserted,) Of the lessening year by year of venerableness, and of the dicta of officers, statutes, pulpits, schools, Of the rising forever taller and stronger and broader of the intuitions of men and women, and of Self-esteem and Personality; Of the true New World—of the Democracies resplendent en-masse, Of the conformity…†   (source)
  • In true religion is there some dictum That says it's okay to make an heir your victim?†   (source)
  • * *reproach "Now, Sir, of elde* ye repreve me: *age And certes, Sir, though none authority* *text, dictum Were in no book, ye gentles of honour Say, that men should an olde wight honour, And call him father, for your gentleness; And authors shall I finden, as I guess.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)