"Extenuation" Quotes from Famous Books
... if on a fitting occasion, as now, to have avowed it, if all this be a proof of the justice of the charge brought against me of having "turned round upon my Mother-Church with contumely and slander," in this sense, but in no other sense, do I plead guilty to it without a word in extenuation. ... — Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a moor cock doesn't fly that way," Willis drawlingly explained, in extenuation of the poor shooting. "He doesn't go right up and down, you 'now. He has wings, don't you 'now, and flies straight away, like a shot. I could hit a grouse without any trouble, but this kind of shooting! The best shot in England would be bothered ... — Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... word means, 'muzzled.' The man is self-condemned, and, having nothing to say in extenuation, the solemn promise is pronounced of ejection from the lighted hall, with limbs bound so that he cannot struggle, and consignment to the blackness outside, of which our Lord adds, in words not put into the king's mouth, but which we have ... — Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... do to recognize anything like a graduated scale of responsibility. A very bad training in youth would be in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong thing done; and you may remember, accordingly, how that magnanimous monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad education. But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily endeavor to fix each wrongdoer's place in the scale of responsibility, and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough justice in five ... — Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... sixteenth chapter I cannot help considering as a very ingenious and specious, but very disgraceful extenuation of the cruelties perpetrated by the Roman magistrates against the Christians. It is written in the most contemptibly factious spirit of prejudice against the sufferers; it is unworthy of a philosopher and of humanity. Let the narrative of Cyprian's death be examined. He had ... — The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
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