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punitive
in a sentence

show 19 more with this conextual meaning
  • Our cultural heritage will be lost to a whole generation, excluded by a punitive financial barrier.†   (source)
  • If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed against the enemy.†   (source)
  • No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.†   (source)
  • He had been trained in coded field communications to take advantage of his obvious intelligence, and to avoid the likely consequences of his physical immaturity if he were an infantry regular, which would be certain injury and possible death at the punitive hands of superiors, long before an enemy confronted him.†   (source)
  • It's an unrelenting, punitive, miserable existence.†   (source)
  • Physical modesty in such cramped quarters 1 The fine for killing alligators appears to be a conservation measure and means of controlling turtles, not a punitive action against the Negroes, though few Negroes realize this. was impossible, indeed in such a context it would have been ridiculous.†   (source)
  • It was a more effective, and more demoralizing, treatment than any punitive action could have been.†   (source)
  • And as if punitive taxation, the destruction of their property, and all their other sufferings were not enough, they are subjected to pogroms, insults, and accusations that they lack patriotism.†   (source)
  • When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel.†   (source)
  • But just because of it, the punitive organs that are to be abolished will be in all the greater hurry to settle their local accounts before the end, and they will be all the more savage.†   (source)
  • Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn's investigating and punitive squads.†   (source)
  • Terrified by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the peasants of the surrounding countryside had fled from their homes and now sought to join the partisans, whom they regarded as their natural protectors.†   (source)
  • He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know whether they were purely punitive—whether he had really at the back of his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as my Aunt Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and cousin Melchior to Darwin, or whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle in which indeed he shone.†   (source)
  • And she would make me stand and endure a punitive silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin--a source of jokes.†   (source)
  • He was saying that Christianity originally was aimed at the lowly and slaves, and that was why crucifixion and nailing and all such punitive grandeur of martyrdom were necessary.†   (source)
  • Mason's manner was snarling, punitive, sinister, bitterly sarcastic.†   (source)
  • Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in one of those fields again.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, on account of the nature of the contents which seemed to both the warden and the Rev. Guilford to be more charitable and punitive than otherwise, and because plainly, if not verifiably, it was from that Miss X of repute or notoriety in connection with his trial, it was decided, after due deliberation, that Clyde should be permitted to read it—even that it was best that he should.†   (source)
  • He means to test us, and something punitive comes next.†   (source)
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