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/kˈɔrnərstˌoʊn/ Listen

Cornerstone

noun

The fundamental assumptions from which something is begun or developed or calculated or explained. Synonyms: base, basis, foundation, fundament, groundwork.

A stone in the exterior of a large and important building; usually carved with a date and laid with appropriate ceremonies.

A stone at the outer corner of two intersecting masonry walls.

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Etymology of 'Cornerstone'

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"Cornerstone" Quotes from Famous Books

... date—although this night had given signs of being the last one. For a while that spring, desoxyribonucleic acid had begun to take second place in my heart. This is a pitiful admission for a biochemist to make—DNA should be the cornerstone of his life. But Shari was something rare—a gorgeous woman, if somewhat distant, who was thoroughly intelligent. She had already earned her doctorate, while I was still struggling with the tag ends ...

— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... will always be mentioned with honor,' Macaulay says, 'as a founder of a colony who did not, in his dealings with a savage people, abuse the strength derived from civilization, and as a lawgiver who, in an age of persecution, made religious liberty the cornerstone of his policy.' ...

— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... Nevertheless, he had been mixed up in too many romances not to find the relation between the sexes a problem of engrossing interest. Furthermore, of late he had been doing a little private castle-building, the foundations of which now abruptly collapsed into ruins at his feet. The cornerstone of this dream-structure had been laid the day he had first seen Robert Morton and Delight Hathaway together. What a well-mated pair they were! For years it had been his unwhispered ambition to see his favorite ...

— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... themselves, after hours of discussion, unable to agree; and at last they sent for Lincoln. He suggested that all could unite on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and hostility to the extension of slavery. "Let us," said he, "in building our new party make our cornerstone the Declaration of Independence; let us build on this rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us." The problem was mastered, and the ...

— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... thirteen colonies along the coast had increased to twenty-four independent, growing and progressive commonwealths, reaching a thousand miles westward from the sea. Lafayette was the nation's guest for a year. On June 17, 1825, just fifty years after the battle of Bunker Hill, he laid the cornerstone of the obelisk which commemorates that battle in Boston. On this same occasion Daniel Webster made one of his great speeches. Lafayette returned to France in the American frigate "Brandywine," named in honor of the first battle in which Lafayette ...

— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

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