All 50 Uses of
precise
in
Atlas Shrugged
- Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision.†
Chpt 1.1
- It had been a precision machine tool once, long ago, of a kind that could not be bought anywhere now.†
Chpt 1.4
- His voice was precise and monotonous; it connoted safety.†
Chpt 1.4
- He spoke five languages, and he spoke English without a trace of accent, a precise, cultured English deliberately mixed with slang.†
Chpt 1.5
- She found pleasure in the rapid precision of her hands.†
Chpt 1.5
- His features had the fine precision of sculpture.†
Chpt 1.5
- "It's the first time you've invited that …." he used an obscene word with unemotional precision, "to my house.†
Chpt 1.6
- She spoke with polite, impersonal precision.†
Chpt 1.7
- Her face was not pale, but its planes stood out with strangely naked precision, as if its skin had lost the shadings of color.†
Chpt 1.7
- Her voice was pronouncing the words with impersonal precision.†
Chpt 1.7
- He had attended to the matter without breaking his chain of appointments, without raising his voice, without sign of strain, uncertainty or apprehension; he had acted with the swift precision of a military commander under sudden fire-and Gwen Ives, his secretary, had acted as his calmest lieutenant.†
Chpt 1.7
- If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it-that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood.†
Chpt 1.7
- The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young.†
Chpt 1.8
- His movements, as he buttoned his shirt, as he buckled the belt of his slacks, had the rapid precision of performing a duty.†
Chpt 1.9
- His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.†
Chpt 1.10
- She watched the man as he removed their dishes, put the dimes into the pocket of his white jacket, wiped the counter, working with swift precision.†
Chpt 1.10
- At the end of the dinner, Danagger had said in the same precise, impassive tone, the tone of a man who knows the exact meaning of his words, "If any employee of yours or mine discovers this and attempts private blackmail, I will pay it, within reason.†
Chpt 2.2
- He was aware of nothing else-except that the sum of it was the exultant feeling of action, of his own capacity, of his body's precision, of its response to his will.†
Chpt 2.3
- You ought to keep silent, precisely because they're wrong.†
Chpt 2.4
- You concluded that I was the safest person in the world for you to spit on, precisely because I held you by the throat.†
Chpt 2.4
- It was part of your job to watch precisely for things of that kind, wasn't it?†
Chpt 2.4
- But whether this had been Boyle's motive or whether it had been the principle of sacrifice, no one could tell and it made no difference: if Boyle had been a saint of the creed of selflessness, he would have had to do precisely what he had done.†
Chpt 2.5
- Just put a-few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr. Kinnan mentioned: that the blame rests on the victims.†
Chpt 2.6
- "Precisely," said Dr. Ferris.†
Chpt 2.6 *
- Her posture had the lightness and unself-conscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence.†
Chpt 2.6
- With the conscientious precision of a railroad man, in the moment when the hand of the clock ended the half-hour, he signed his name to the order instructing the Comet to proceed with Engine Number 306, and transmitted the order to Winston Station.†
Chpt 2.7
- Dagny, you're more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery.†
Chpt 2.8
- Eddie raised his voice a little, more in precision and clarity than in volume: "I know where she is.†
Chpt 2.8
- She threw the door of her closet open, jerked a suit off a hanger and folded it rapidly, while her voice went on with unhurried precision.†
Chpt 2.9
- It stands-as the money of a free country-for achievement, for success, for ability, for man's creative power-and, precisely for these reasons, it is used as a brand of infamy.†
Chpt 2.10
- From condensed milk to condensed music to the condensed sight of precision instruments-what wealth had they not given to the world and what had they received in return?†
Chpt 2.10
- The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing…†
Chpt 3.1
- There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board.†
Chpt 3.1
- She laughed, remembering the quiet self-control, the strict precision, the stern logic of the young scientist she had known.†
Chpt 3.1
- She glanced at his clothes: the gray slacks and white shirt seemed of a quality intended for long wear; the leather of the narrow belt about his waistline was cracked; the watch on his wrist was a precision instrument, but made of plain stainless steel.†
Chpt 3.1
- The building that came next was a small, squat block of rough granite, sturdy, solid, neatly built, the lines of its rectangular bulk as severely precise as the creases of a formal garment-but she saw, like an instant's ghost, the long streak of a skyscraper rising into the coils of Chicago's fog, the skyscraper that had once borne the sign she now saw written in gold letters above a modest pine-wood door: Mulligan Bank.†
Chpt 3.1
- …of its betters-I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who'd acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs…… It was that night that I took the oath never to let them hear another note of mine.†
Chpt 3.1
- She had never experienced the pleasure of motion, of walking as if her feet had no weight to carry, as if the support of the cane in her hand were merely a superfluous touch of elegance, the pleasure of feeling her steps trace swift, straight lines, of sensing the faultless, spontaneous precision of her gestures-as she experienced it while placing their food on the table in front of the two men.†
Chpt 3.2
- It was true-she thought, when she walked through the streets of the valley, looking with a child's excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun-that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art-and that the art-she thought, when she sat in the darkness of a clapboard concert hall, listening to the controlled violence and the mathematical precision of Halley's music-had the stern discipline of business.†
Chpt 3.2
- She lay awake, through the hours of that night, quietly motionless, following-like an engineer and like Hank Rearden-a process of dispassionate, precise, almost mathematical consideration, with no regard for cost or feeling.†
Chpt 3.2
- It occurred to him that that was precisely the reason why his meeting with Dr. Ferris had been delayed to this moment; but he brushed the thought aside, just as he brushed some insect buzzing to reach his wet temple.†
Chpt 3.3
- It is precisely because I have not forgotten it that I am speaking, 'Robert Stadler' is an illustrious name, which I would hate to see destroyed.†
Chpt 3.3
- She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose-and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes.†
Chpt 3.3
- This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine, summing up to his full satisfaction.†
Chpt 3.4
- She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her.†
Chpt 3.4
- She was seeing-in the chaos of a perishing continent —the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held.†
Chpt 3.5
- It seemed to her for a moment as if she, too, were a precision instrument of high technology, left without electric current, trying to run a transcontinental railroad by means of her two hands.†
Chpt 3.5
- It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful-until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth-and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?†
Chpt 3.6
- All right, I'll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me, too.†
Chpt 3.6
- An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess.†
Chpt 3.7
Definition:
-
(precise as in: about noon; 12:03 to be precise) exact (accurate)editor's notes: In the fields of science, engineering, and statistics, precise and accurate are not properly used as synonyms the way they are in general usage.
If you throw darts at a dartboard and keep missing the bullseye, but hit in the same place on the dartboard each time, you would be described as precise, but not accurate.
If you seldom hit the bullseye, but tended to get close each time, you would be described as accurate, but not precise.
Finally, if you hit the bullseye each time, you would be considered both accurate and precise.