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liability
in a sentence
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show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • Her speed is an asset, but her short height is a liability for basketball.
    liability = negative trait or thing that creates a problem
  • But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane.   (source)
    liability = something negative
  • When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning "twentieth-century inventions," more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.   (source)
  • Two people in the dark would be a liability if one of them can't see.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • Leigh will become a huge liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
  • Joe had become a liability to Emma's, so he withdrew and took the warehouse space across Bay Street.   (source)
  • Nothing about the death of my mother stopped time for my father, prevented him from reckoning his assets and liabilities and spreading himself more widely over the landscape.   (source)
    liabilities = weaknesses
  • And does he imagine that being a virtuous character exposes you to greater or fewer liabilities as you roam the world?   (source)
    liabilities = things that cause problems
  • Considering that he has lived through five or six languages, five or six countries, two or three centuries of history; has seen his country, city, and family butchered, bargained with pirates and bureaucrats, eaten filth in order to stay alive; that he has survived every degradation known to this century, considering all those liabilities, isn't it amazing that he can read a Condensed and Simplified for Modern Students edition of A Tale of Two Cities?   (source)
    liabilities = things that create a problem
  • Minho was a liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
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  • Apparently, a Capitol pedigree is no protection here. Maybe it's even a liability.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • I'm a liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
  • Far from being a liability, a high turnover rate in the meatpacking industry — as in the fast food industry — also helps maintain a workforce that is harder to unionize and much easier to control.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • John Carroll is a Southern gentleman whose integrity and high standards have become liabilities.   (source)
    liabilities = things that cause problems
  • The next time something came at us, I would be ready. An asset, not a liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
  • A dog that had become a liability.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • "I think," I said stiffly, "that I am more of an asset than a liability."   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
  • My parents are a liability in this as in other matters.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • Crisis Doesn't Excuse Liabilities   (source)
    liabilities = negative traits or things that creates problems
  • Teabing struggled deeply with the decision, but in the end Rémy had proven himself a liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
  • Quite frankly, Opus Dei has become a liability and an embarrassment.   (source)
    liability = something that creates a problem
  • After all the anguish and grief Danny had caused her, after she'd thrown him out of the house and gotten police protection from him, Danny was suddenly her beloved dead son, miraculously transformed from a dangerous liability into an asset worth ten million dollars.   (source)
    liability = person who causes a problem
  • You are not a liability.   (source)
    liability = someone who creates a problem
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  • Assets are worth a million dollars, but liabilities exceed that.
    liabilities = debt and other financial obligations
  • There are no liabilities, Mr. Brigance.   (source)
  • The liabilities would be ….   (source)
    liabilities = financial obligations
  • She knew every farmer for miles about: how much land he had under cultivation, how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were.   (source)
    liabilities = debt and other financial obligations
  • Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up—and that afflicted fool did not make it any easier.   (source)
  • For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no inducement.   (source)
    liability = financial obligation
  • "I do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to his resources and his liabilities both," she went on, looking at the wall; "but I never will desert Mr. Micawber!"   (source)
    liabilities = debt and other financial obligations
  • The Englishman entered, and found Morrel seated at a table, turning over the formidable columns of his ledger, which contained the list of his liabilities.   (source)
  • In his will he writes that you have a good knowledge of his assets and liabilities.   (source)
  • In a few months we'll submit to the court an accounting and inventory of all your father's assets and liabilities.   (source)
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  • Mr. Amburgh was vice president of my holding company and has a working knowledge of my assets and liabilities.   (source)
  • Once the executor is in place, you and he will begin the task of locating assets and identifying liabilities.   (source)
  • There was nothing liquid about his balance sheet, but when his liabilities were subtracted from his assets, there was an impressive figure for his equity.   (source)
  • He was particularly curious about Mr. Russell Amburgh, described in the handwritten will as once the vice president of Seth's holding company and the man with the knowledge of the assets and liabilities.   (source)
  • But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of generosities proper to his station.   (source)
  • I trust I have not, in talking of his liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine.   (source)
  • It was a devil of a blow; it was like death; for she imagined that by that time she had really got to the bottom of her husband's liabilities.   (source)
  • "I will not," continued he, after a moment's silence, "conceal from you, that while your probity and exactitude up to this moment are universally acknowledged, yet the report is current in Marseilles that you are not able to meet your liabilities."   (source)
  • Not so much in point of amount as owing to the peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities Mr. C. has incurred and the means he has of liquidating or meeting the same.   (source)
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  • Exposing people to liability against the standard of hindsight, however, creates not a safer world but one in which people simply avoid socially useful activities. Obstetricians quit. Seesaws disappear. Businesses stop giving references. The City of New York did, in fact, cut the limbs off trees near playgrounds so children would not be tempted to climb them.   (source)
  • Liability insurance should cover the financial costs of the accident.
  • Software companies have never accepted product liability like every other industry.   (source)
    liability = legal obligation or responsibility
  • The immunity from civil liability given to prosecutors and judges is even greater than the protections provided to law enforcement officers.   (source)
    liability = legal responsibility (permitting lawsuits)
  • It proved to be a bit more difficult than they had anticipated, because of liability and transportation issues, but they did end up working with a couple of schools from Brooklyn.   (source)
    liability = legal responsibility (that can result in lawsuits)
  • We allege criminal misconduct; we shout about antitrust; we sue for ancient and dubious liabilities.   (source)
    liabilities = legal obligations
  • A physician violates his duty to his patient and subjects himself to liability if he withholds any facts which are necessary to form the basis of an intelligent consent by the patient to the proposed treatment.   (source)
    liability = legal obligation (that can result in lawsuits)
  • If the marriage-wrecking knowledge of my liabilities surfaced before the wedding, I wasn't sure what would happen.   (source)
    liabilities = legal obligations
  • She would not like the liability implications, but then again, were there such implications?   (source)
    liability = legal responsibility (that can result in lawsuits)
  • Think of the liability exposure.   (source)
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  • For years the large meatpacking companies have managed to avoid the sort of liability routinely imposed on the manufacturers of most consumer products.   (source)
  • They found the office of the refuge manager at the far end of town and Matt went in and received a permit and signed a liability release.   (source)
  • Not a chance, she was told, because of regulatory issues, liability issues, janitorial union issues, and health and safety issues.   (source)
  • Two years earlier, his firm had spent $200,000 on a product liability case, and lost.   (source)
    liability = legal responsibility
  • And he will have more personal liability than the governors of Massachusetts and Delaware.   (source)
    liability = legal obligation or responsibility
  • They said that he bad exposed them to liability.   (source)
    liability = legal obligation (that could result in a lawsuit)
  • If Tate was a state officer, Monroe County would have no liability for his misconduct and no recovery would be possible from the State of Alabama.   (source)
    liability = legal responsibility
  • Our civil suit ran up against laws that give police, prosecutors, and judges special immunity from civil liability in criminal justice matters.   (source)
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • I can see her being a bit of a liability at the Ministry of Magic …. maybe that's why Bagman didn't bother to look for her for so long.†   (source)
  • I mean, Olympus had to have liability issues, right?†   (source)
  • They were a liability.†   (source)
  • "I know it's a liability, walking with me, eating with me, always folding my clothes and shining my boots and tutoring me.†   (source)
  • In Stanleyville we quickly saw I was a liability, even more than in Bulungu.†   (source)
  • "He was a liability on the defensive end:' said Harrington.†   (source)
  • Andie would be a liability going forward.†   (source)
  • You'll just be a liability.†   (source)
  • The crowd suddenly seemed like a liability.†   (source)
  • What are our liabilities?†   (source)
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  • The intent of his queries as he soon established, was to introduce a subject the prosecution had emphatically avoided: the question of Wells' own role in the murder plot, and his own moral liability.†   (source)
  • The change, I decided, was not a liability but an opportunity.†   (source)
  • "Basically you don't want Uncle Al to start thinking of you as a financial liability.†   (source)
  • Dalgard then called C. J. Peters and asked that the Army assume responsibility for any liability that would arise after the Army took over.†   (source)
  • I would be worse than useless in battle, I would be a weakness and a liability, one who could easily be captured and used against you.†   (source)
  • Aidid's people had planted explosives in the schoolyard to kill or maim children, preventing them from growing up to be effective fighters—turning them into liabilities.†   (source)
  • Asset or liability?†   (source)
  • He flew to Baghdad for a six-month deployment, and upon his arrival, Adam's superiors decided that his limited vision was a liability.†   (source)
  • Abdullah introduced Mortenson to his Pathan friend Hashmatullah, a handsome young fixer who'd been a Taliban soldier, until his wounds made him a liability in the field.†   (source)
  • Think of the liability.†   (source)
  • It fell to Mike Strank to confront Rene's liabilities and turn this weak link into a useful integer in the chain.†   (source)
  • You are a liability to your group.†   (source)
  • Appearances can be a liability as well as an asset.†   (source)
  • That was why he was a liability.†   (source)
  • By writing only to himself, for himself, by dutifully reckoning day by day his moral assets and liabilities, and particularly the liabilities, he could thus improve himself.†   (source)
  • Even Jackie's recent vacation has turned out to be a liability.†   (source)
  • He's a loose end, someone who's outlived his usefulness and is now a liability.†   (source)
  • If they went in after him, it would have been a big liability issue.†   (source)
  • Or it can be a liability, depending.†   (source)
  • Then you will all be free to return to your homesafter signing a waiver-of-liability form, but the legal officer will take care of that.†   (source)
  • When Mal'akh had first seen Trish in the lobby, he'd seen a liability.†   (source)
  • If he heads for Macao,' Mr Allister had said quietly, 'he could be a terrible liability…'†   (source)
  • "To get somewhere," said Grover, "a man has to understand his assets and his liabilities.†   (source)
  • He's a total liability, and you're out of your mind if you think it's fine that he's here!"†   (source)
  • It was in limiting those liabilities that the best distinguished themselves from the merely better.†   (source)
  • The smell of ethanol on his sleeves had proven a liability, and so he had transformed it into an asset, stripping off his shirt and jacket and using them to help corner his prey.†   (source)
  • Instinct warned him however that extra help, especially untrained help, would be nothing but a liability.†   (source)
  • Liability?†   (source)
  • But in the air, those were liabilities.†   (source)
  • They think you're a liability issue.†   (source)
  • And that re stricted movement was not a liability where his current appearance was concerned; in truth, it was an asset.†   (source)
  • For this deployment, Adam's third and his second to a combat zone, he had been cleared for direct action, having proven that his virtually blind eye was not a liability.†   (source)
  • Frankly, if he heads for Macao, he could become a terrible liability rather than the asset we think we've created.'†   (source)
  • "And even though he'd been cleared and was on the roster, somebody went back in and reconsidered, figured there is no way he will pass without perfect vision, and because it's a dangerous course—lots of live ammunition, explosives—they did not want that liability."†   (source)
  • You're not only gonna be useless, you're gonna be a positive liability unless you get some rest, preferably sleep.†   (source)
  • The commando's cover was acceptable, his playing of it even more so, but like most covers there was always the glaring but unrecognized liability.†   (source)
  • 'It's Edward's theory, and one to which I subscribe, that when the final contract was carried out or when it was deemed that he knew too much and was therefore a liability, the impostor was to be killed collecting a payment —believing, of course, that he was being given another assignment.†   (source)
  • I mean, the Banner is becoming a kind of liability.†   (source)
  • Is this liability of mine to scene receiving the origin of my writing impulse?†   (source)
  • Or is that only a dangerous liability?†   (source)
  • The state-owned railroad had once been an asset to the state but now it was a liability and its debts had piled up to the million mark.†   (source)
  • Don Jaime, at seven years, was a rachitic little body who seemed to have inherited not only his mother's forehead and eyes, but his father's liability to convulsions.†   (source)
  • Particularly when you have no weapons except your genius, which is not a weapon but a great liability.†   (source)
  • Under these circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter how ardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no more of them in Nazi Germany.†   (source)
  • And anything less than that is a liability.†   (source)
  • The liability is that his part helplessness will make him more malignant than ever.†   (source)
  • No visible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect.†   (source)
  • With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.†   (source)
  • It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain.†   (source)
  • Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her running away was past, released Kiche.†   (source)
  • Amory had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee—(but Amory never included them as being among the saved).†   (source)
  • "They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son's services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation."†   (source)
  • …been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish, and which I loved as much as all the rest—so what I…†   (source)
  • VI It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could—my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companion's knowledge, henceforth—a knowledge half consternation and half compassion—of that liability.†   (source)
  • She tried to console herself with the thought that a score of other persons, men and women, were equally tremulous concerning the outcome of their efforts, but she could not disassociate the general danger from her own individual liability.†   (source)
  • Though at the time Captain Vere was quite ignorant of Billy's liability to vocal impediment, he now immediately divined it, since vividly Billy's aspect recalled to him that of a bright young schoolmate of his whom he had once seen struck by much the same startling impotence in the act of eagerly rising in the class to be foremost in response to a testing question put to it by the master.†   (source)
  • The liability of shipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water that weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.†   (source)
  • Equal liability of all to labour.†   (source)
  • A part of them were set aside by his Excellency for the payment of certain outstanding debts and liabilities, the charges incident on his high situation required considerable expense; finally, it was found that he could not spare to his wife more than three hundred pounds a year, which he proposed to pay to her on an undertaking that she would never trouble him.†   (source)
  • Horrid visions passed through my mind when I thought of his liability to fall into the slave trader's hands.†   (source)
  • In the baser sort, its effect was to increase the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization of his dreams.†   (source)
  • Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.†   (source)
  • It was not that she was glad of his embarrassment; on the contrary, it excited all her own liabilities of this kind, and gave her great pain.†   (source)
  • To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation.†   (source)
  • In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.†   (source)
  • The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances.†   (source)
  • There were accidents to machinery, the liability of trains to run off the line, collisions, bad weather, the blocking up by snow—were not all these against Phileas Fogg?†   (source)
  • Cassy had always kept over Legree the kind of influence that a strong, impassioned woman can ever keep over the most brutal man; but, of late, she had grown more and more irritable and restless, under the hideous yoke of her servitude, and her irritability, at times, broke out into raving insanity; and this liability made her a sort of object of dread to Legree, who had that superstitious horror of insane persons which is common to coarse and uninstructed minds.†   (source)
  • 'tis very ill done, I am conscious, to expose messieurs the sergeants of the watch to the liability of cudgelling beneath this cassock the humerus of a Pythagorean philosopher.†   (source)
  • She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.†   (source)
  • The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow against the corner of a table.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to spend the hundred pounds.†   (source)
  • Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville, London.†   (source)
  • Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land—a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders—whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers—where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!†   (source)
  • Our knowledge of the north did not extend farther than New York; and to go there, and be forever harassed with the frightful liability of being returned to slavery—with the certainty of being treated tenfold worse than before—the thought was truly a horrible one, and one which it was not easy to overcome.†   (source)
  • This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr. Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will Ladislaw much trouble.†   (source)
  • 'I could not receive it as a gift,' said Mr. Micawber, full of fire and animation, 'but if a sufficient sum could be advanced, say at five per cent interest, per annum, upon my personal liability — say my notes of hand, at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months, respectively, to allow time for something to turn up —'†   (source)
  • With the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why he should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman.†   (source)
  • I had often thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what 'pecuniary liabilities' they were establishing in Canterbury, and to recall how shy Mr. Micawber was of me when he became clerk to Uriah Heep.†   (source)
  • Suffice it to observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that those passages in which he more particularly traced his own successful career to its source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present.†   (source)
  • Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil — I allude to spectacles — and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions.†   (source)
  • How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums of money, on account of those 'pecuniary liabilities', in reference to which he had been so business-like as between man and man; how Janet, returning into my aunt's service when she came back to Dover, had finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by entering into wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper; and how my aunt had finally set her seal on…†   (source)
  • Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained that he had not been able to approach this subject; that it had shared the fate of Mr. Micawber's liabilities, in not being comprehended in the terms he had made; that we were no longer of any authority with Uriah Heep; and that if he could do us, or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would.†   (source)
  • Where, for the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed, from day to day, by importune voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal service of process was not required, and detainees were merely lodged at the gate!†   (source)
  • He might well have added that the Roman power was at its zenith when every citizen acknowledged his liability to fight for the State, but that it began to decline as soon as this obligation was no longer recognized.†   (source)
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