actuate

in a sentence

Timers, batteries, switches, actuators.†  (source) Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997

These were novel concepts to one who had been taught to believe that wolves were not only capable of catching almost anything but, actuated by an insatiable blood lust, would slaughter everything which came within their range.†  (source) Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf, 1963

The pilots input the flight plan and the load sheet through the MCDU keyboards, and all en route flight-plan changes are also actuated with the McDoos.†  (source) Dean Koontz, Sole Survivor, 1997

Actuated by short wave.†  (source) Roger Zelazny, My Name is Legion, 1976

I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Leonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round.†  (source) Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913

What I saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile—was the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age.†  (source) Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

It was a dissolving fire which was actuating him now.†  (source) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900

Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered.†  (source) George Orwell, 1984, 1949

Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me.†  (source) Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1846

I must own that I could not give a negative answer to this question, without first obliterating every impression which I have received with regard to the present genius of the people of America, the spirit which actuates the State legislatures, and the principles which are incorporated with the political character of every class of citizens I am unable to conceive that the people of America, in their present temper, or under any circumstances which can speedily happen, will choose, and every second year repeat the choice of, sixty-five or a hundred men who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery.†  (source) James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, & John Jay, The Federalist Papers, 1788

Quite aside from any conceivable motive actuating the Master-at-arms, and irrespective of the provocation to the blow, a martial court must needs in the present case confine its attention to the blow's consequence, which consequence justly is to be deemed not otherwise than as the striker's deed.†  (source) Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924

And though his questions were unpleasantly blunt, they seemed actuated by a friendly interest.†  (source) Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936

Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.†  (source) George Washington, Washington's Farewell Address, 1796