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axiom
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  • It was an axiom of his that any swelling in a woman's abdomen was a pregnancy until proven otherwise.†   (source)
  • Even in the matter of the species…Well, the two axioms of Darwinian theory—the continuity of nature and adaptable design—have never been validated by a single empirical discovery in nearly a hundred and fifty years.†   (source)
  • Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.†   (source)
  • It rests on universal axioms.†   (source)
  • It became an axiom for me.†   (source)
  • The axiom that a man is innocent until proved guilty by a court of law has been flagrantly ignored once again in the State of Mississippi.†   (source)
  • "All roads lead to Amber," he said, as though it were an axiom.†   (source)
  • It is an axiom of governance that power, once acquired, is seldom freely relinquished.
  • We prove with axioms. We do not prove axioms, so we have to agree on a place to start.
  • "All men beneath your position covet your station," went the Bene Gesserit axiom.†   (source)
  • And he retains besides all Euclid's other axioms.†   (source)
  • The axioms of geometry, in other words, are merely disguised definitions.†   (source)
  • Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body.†   (source)
  • Should we therefore conclude that the axioms of geometry are experimental verities?†   (source)
  • A Bene Gesserit axiom came to Jessica's mind: "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.†   (source)
  • All the other axioms seemed so obvious as to be unquestionable, but this one did not.†   (source)
  • I always remember the regent's axiom: a leader, hesaid, is like a shepherd.†   (source)
  • This subverts a mathematical axiom: it takes away a part, yet lets the whole remain.†   (source)
  • Other truths in ethics and politics are not scientific axioms.†   (source)
  • "Axiom: that illness isn't productive.†   (source)
  • Mr. Hartsfield waved away my questions about how to calculate and compare flat areas (the fins) and curved surfaces (the casement) to first immerse us in Euclidean geometry and all of its axioms and postulates and proofs.†   (source)
  • And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: "The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off.†   (source)
  • It had long been sought in vain, he said, to demonstrate the axiom known as Euclid's fifth postulate and this search was the start of the crisis.†   (source)
  • A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid's postulate, but also the first axiom, which states that only one straight line can pass through two points.†   (source)
  • Then, having identified the nature of geometric axioms, he turned to the question, Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true?†   (source)
  • To solve the problem of what is mathematical truth, Poincaré said, we should first ask ourselves what is the nature of geometric axioms.†   (source)
  • Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms.†   (source)
  • His judgment that the scientist selects facts, hypotheses and axioms on the basis of harmony, also left the rough serrated edge of a puzzle incomplete.†   (source)
  • They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid's postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid's postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry.†   (source)
  • Poincaré concluded that the axioms of geometry are conventions, our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts, but it remains free and is limited only by the necessity of avoiding all contradiction.†   (source)
  • My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live.†   (source)
  • He recognized his condition — only a suicidal fool would not — and there was no time or place to remedy it with— an axiom he had stolen from Medusa's Echo.†   (source)
  • It is an axiom of motorcycling that you must always look in the direction you want to go and never at what you are trying to avoid.†   (source)
  • His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists.†   (source)
  • An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.†   (source)
  • It is an axiom of law and reason that whatever the goal, the means are authorized: Wherever a general power is authorized, the specific powers needed to reach the goal are included.†   (source)
  • It is an axiom in our political system that the State governments will, in all situations, provide complete security against invasions of liberty by the national authority.†   (source)
  • We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.†   (source)
  • To analyze this mission statement, logic and legal axioms have two rules: First, if possible, every part of the mission statement should have meaning and made to reach some common goal.†   (source)
  • An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not.†   (source)
  • He concentrated on the relief of the mirror's cooling touch, wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty.†   (source)
  • It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.†   (source)
  • …asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness-he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both-he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, "When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn't choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound no theories…†   (source)
  • They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness-they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim.†   (source)
  • Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it-let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs-let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception —let the head-hunter who does not…†   (source)
  • Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.†   (source)
  • Existence exists-and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.†   (source)
  • Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.†   (source)
  • There is no knowledge, they teach, there's only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another's faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon-truth is whatever people…†   (source)
  • You know, Scarlett, money ill come by never comes to good and this house is proof of the axiom.†   (source)
  • The axioms of the few are shared by the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believe soberly.†   (source)
  • This was not the axiom he wanted.†   (source)
  • With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.†   (source)
  • The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that "the good salesman will never take no for his answer," that he should "stick to his prospect" even if rebuffed, that he should "try to get the customer's psychology," the boy would fall into step with an unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad sheets of The Post under the man's…†   (source)
  • It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.†   (source)
  • This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass."†   (source)
  • "Hm…. yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom.†   (source)
  • "Oh, I don't know; it's definitions, and axioms, and triangles, and things.†   (source)
  • It seemed to Catherine that if she were his sister she would disprove this axiom.†   (source)
  • It is an axiom of criminal law, and, consequently, you understand its full application.†   (source)
  • Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth.†   (source)
  • We've dropped behind the peasants—that's an axiom.†   (source)
  • I have been nearly mad; and you know the axiom,—non bis in idem.†   (source)
  • I consider that an axiom.†   (source)
  • But Naphta's and Joachim's worlds had something else special in common : their relationship to blood and the axiom that one should not refrain from shedding it.†   (source)
  • To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.†   (source)
  • The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom.†   (source)
  • After scanning their faces he stood less as mustering his thoughts for expression, than as one inly deliberating how best to put them to well—meaning men not intellectually mature, men with whom it was necessary to demonstrate certain principles that were axioms to himself.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: "We all have our pet common people—" and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosom.†   (source)
  • Yet his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use of curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest axioms of economics.†   (source)
  • He spoke simply, and utterly without emotion; with the manner of a teacher setting forth to a group of scholars an axiom in geometry, he would enunciate such propositions as made the hair of an ordinary person rise on end.†   (source)
  • My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties.†   (source)
  • He began by alluding to her excellence, a priori, the axiom of her seraphic super-humanity, the revelation of her inexpressible virtues, no conception of which could possibly be formed.†   (source)
  • If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the like-minded.†   (source)
  • Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that these men, through their very delusions, showed great qualities, susceptible of being turned to the happiest and best account; and that to pretend (on the strength of sweeping axioms, howsoever cut and dried) that they went astray wholly without cause, and of their own irrational wills, was to pretend that there could be smoke without fire, death without birth, harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from…†   (source)
  • The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises.†   (source)
  • Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature.†   (source)
  • From this view of things, then, comes the axiom that if you visit to discover the author of any bad action, seek first to discover the person to whom the perpetration of that bad action could be in any way advantageous.†   (source)
  • I've no doubt a great many women begin that way," said his lordship, who, be it averred, did not in the least believe in the axiom he thus beguiled his anxiety by uttering.†   (source)
  • In chemistry also the axiom fails.†   (source)
  • In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country.†   (source)
  • This theory, which was nearly unknown to the republics of antiquity—which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths—and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political science of the present age.†   (source)
  • Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do no wrong; and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain her own immaculateness entire.†   (source)
  • Lord Warburton seemed scarcely in the mood for doing justice to general axioms—he was thinking of a special case.†   (source)
  • This was for him an axiom, assumed once for all without question, and he went his way without hesitation, relying on it.†   (source)
  • I know of nothing in politics which deserves to fix the attention of the legislator more closely than these two new axioms of the science of manufactures.†   (source)
  • It may be further remarked, that Miss Knag still aimed at youth, although she had shot beyond it, years ago; and that she was weak and vain, and one of those people who are best described by the axiom, that you may trust them as far as you can see them, and no farther.†   (source)
  • It came to Catherine with the force—or rather with the vague impressiveness—of a logical axiom which it was not in her province to controvert; and yet, though it was a scientific truth, she felt wholly unable to accept it.†   (source)
  • All the axioms which had served him as points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence of this man.†   (source)
  • "For it's all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you've got to say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is.†   (source)
  • 'Mrs Squeers intended to say 'foundling,' but, as she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence; with which axiom of philosophy, indeed, she was in the constant habit of consoling the boys when they laboured under more than ordinary ill-usage.†   (source)
  • The most enlightened Americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.†   (source)
  • Fortune-Telling Little Dorrit received a call that same evening from Mr Plornish, who, having intimated that he wished to speak to her privately, in a series of coughs so very noticeable as to favour the idea that her father, as regarded her seamstress occupation, was an illustration of the axiom that there are no such stone-blind men as those who will not see, obtained an audience with her on the common staircase outside the door.†   (source)
  • This is the first axiom of the science.†   (source)
  • It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration.†   (source)
  • I won't say very honest, but …. it's an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel.†   (source)
  • Why The President Of The United States Does Not Require The Majority Of The Two Houses In Order To Carry On The Government It is an established axiom in Europe that a constitutional King cannot persevere in a system of government which is opposed by the two other branches of the legislature.†   (source)
  • A man cannot be accused of robbery, if it's impossible to state accurately what he has stolen; that's an axiom.†   (source)
  • The inhabitants of the United States are never fettered by the axioms of their profession; they escape from all the prejudices of their present station; they are not more attached to one line of operation than to another; they are not more prone to employ an old method than a new one; they have no rooted habits, and they easily shake off the influence which the habits of other nations might exercise upon their minds from a conviction that their country is unlike any other, and that its…†   (source)
  • But the latter went on without pity:— " 'Seek whom the crime will profit,' says an axiom of jurisprudence."†   (source)
  • And I won't go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject, all derived from European hypotheses; for what's a hypothesis there, is an axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys themselves.†   (source)
  • It is an algebraic axiom, which makes us proceed from a known to an unknown quantity, and not from an unknown to a known; but sit down, sir, I beg of you.†   (source)
  • In short, doctor although I know you to be the most conscientious man in the world, and although I place the utmost reliance in you, I want, notwithstanding my conviction, to believe this axiom, errare humanum est." "Is there one of my brethren in whom you have equal confidence with myself?"†   (source)
  • And I won't go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject, all derived from European hypotheses; for what's a hypothesis there, is an axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys themselves.†   (source)
  • …was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, "Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you," an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, "Know thyself," a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less…†   (source)
  • And if there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man.†   (source)
  • Out of his confidence come the innumerable saws, axioms and /geflügelte Worte/ in the national arsenal, ranging from the "It won't hurt none to try" of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating confections of the wall-card virtuosi as "The elevator to success is not running; take the stairs."†   (source)
  • It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and renovated vitality.†   (source)
  • There are two rules of construction, dictated by plain reason, as well as founded on legal axioms.†   (source)
  • It rests upon axioms as simple as they are universal; the MEANS ought to be proportioned to the END; the persons, from whose agency the attainment of any END is expected, ought to possess the MEANS by which it is to be attained.†   (source)
  • No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it is included.†   (source)
  • It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.†   (source)
  • This is not the only case in which the articles of Confederation have inconsiderately endeavored to accomplish impossibilities; to reconcile a partial sovereignty in the Union, with complete sovereignty in the States; to subvert a mathematical axiom, by taking away a part, and letting the whole remain.†   (source)
  • So far is the general sense of mankind from corresponding with the tenets of those who endeavor to lull asleep our apprehensions of discord and hostility between the States, in the event of disunion, that it has from long observation of the progress of society become a sort of axiom in politics, that vicinity or nearness of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies.†   (source)
  • If we look into the constitutions of the several States, we find that, notwithstanding the emphatical and, in some instances, the unqualified terms in which this axiom has been laid down, there is not a single instance in which the several departments of power have been kept absolutely separate and distinct.†   (source)
  • If there are such things as political axioms, the propriety of the judicial power of a government being coextensive with its legislative, may be ranked among the number.†   (source)
  • And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common-sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible.†   (source)
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