"Dead letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laughing, "he says that he has my father's permission to make love to me, and he seems determined that the permission shall not become a dead letter ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... end of the Mosaic law being the preparation of the Israelitish people, and through them the world, for Christ's advent, it was not the purpose of God that it should be hidden as a dead letter beside the ark in the inner sanctuary. It was a code for practice, not for theory. It contained the constitution of the state, civil as well as religious; and God's almighty power and faithfulness were ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... found emphatic expression in Black Laws forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section. These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living. In many communities, however, these laws were a dead letter, just as to-day there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois, as in Georgia and Texas, where no Negro ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the system. But, of course, it proved quite unpracticable, and though that lesson obviously remained unlearned during the cycle that separated the Daika and the Daiho periods, there is good reason to think that these particular provisions of the land law (Den-ryo) soon became a dead letter. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... those in respect of which an impromptu bargain might be proposed by the very symbol itself, and assented to without previous formality by the person to whom it was presented. More briefly, the butler of St. John's would not have been able to understand and read it aright. It would have been a dead letter to him—a snuff-box and not a letter; whereas to the butler of Trinity it was a letter ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
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