"Deterrent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from his seat, crying that in Normandy alone was this inhuman decree allowed, that Rome herself had never dared to stain the statute book with such a penalty. The extension of the punishment to the children, far from proving a deterrent, actually encouraged these hopeless and destitute orphans to exist by crime, since every avenue of honest livelihood was barred to them. Deprived of all their father had possessed, they saw their relations in the enjoyment of an increased inheritance. Ruined by punishment ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... Rankin, beating the table, "that's just what I've been trying to tell you. You ought not to care so much for punishing as for deterring. Don't you know that it's a commonplace that it isn't the terrifying quality of the penalty that acts as a deterrent to crime, but it's the certainty of the penalty! If a horse thief knows that there's merely a chance the community will get mad enough to hang him, he'll take that chance in hopes this may not be the time. If, on the other hand, ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... reply. When Egede spoke of spiritual gifts, they asked for good health and blubber: "Our Angekoks give us that." Hell-fire was much in theological evidence in those days, but among the Eskimos it was a failure as a deterrent. They listened to the account of it eagerly and liked the prospect. When at length they became convinced that Egede knew more than their Angekoks, they came to him with the request that he would abolish winter. Very likely they thought that one who had such knowledge of ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... dread, and having discovered that certain acts of his bring on this anger, he cannot subsequently think of committing one of these acts without thinking of the resulting anger, and feeling more or less of the resulting dread. He has no thought of the utility or inutility of the act itself: the deterrent is the mainly vague, but partially definite, fear of evil that may follow. So understood, the deterring emotion is one which has grown out of experiences of utility, using that word in its ethical sense; and if we ask why this dreaded anger is called forth from others, we shall habitually ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... diseases: Where a fungous disease is attacking the leaves, fruit, or twigs, spraying with Bordeaux mixture may prove effective. The application of Bordeaux mixture is deterrent rather than remedial, and should therefore be made immediately before the disease appears. The nature of the disease and the time of treatment can be determined without cost, by submitting specimens of affected portions of the plant for analysis and advice to ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... receive such an impetus from the war as did the aeroplane, but the modern airship has claims for use over distances exceeding 1,000 miles. It can fly by night with even greater ease than by day; fog is no deterrent; engine trouble does not bring it down; and it can take advantage of prevailing winds. It would reduce the sea journey from England to Karachi from 22 to 5 days; from England to Johannesburg from 21 to 7 days; and ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... From the days of Hoyland, and Borrow, and Crabb, down to the present time, but little seems to have been done for the Gipsies. With Crabb died all real interest in the welfare of these poor unfortunate people. The difficulties he had encountered seemed to have had a deterrent effect upon others. Missionary zeal, without moral force of law and the schoolmaster, will accomplish but little for the Gipsies at our doors; and it may be said with special emphasis as regards the improvement of the Gipsy children. From the days of the relentless, cruel, and ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... about the jail was in itself a deterrent to mob action. Meyers had brought twenty or more men from camp, armed and alert, who with those already about the building constituted a force to make any crowd of Mexicans, however angry, think twice before seeking to rescue prisoners. But the wish and the spirit were ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... between its Christians - then aided by Syrian troops - and its Muslims and their Palestinian allies. The cease-fire established in October 1976 between the domestic political groups generally held for about six years, despite occasional fighting. Syrian troops constituted as the Arab Deterrent Force by the Arab League have remained in Lebanon. Syria's move toward supporting the Lebanese Muslims, and the Palestinians and Israel's growing support for Lebanese Christians, brought the two sides ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... two oceans; but, unlike it, the use, unless most carefully guarded by treaties, will belong wholly to the belligerent which controls the sea by its naval power. In case of war, the United States will unquestionably command the Canadian Railroad, despite the deterrent force of operations by the hostile navy upon our seaboard; but no less unquestionably will she be impotent, as against any of the great maritime powers, to control the Central American canal. Militarily speaking, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... mode of reaction of the violent, instinctive, and attractive type. The feud was originally of defensive value to the individual and to the tribe, since in the absence of criminal law the feeling that retaliation would follow was a deterrent from acts of aggression. But it was an expensive method of obtaining order in early society, since response to stimulus reinstated the stimulus, and every death called for another death; so, finally, after many experiments and devices, the state has forbidden ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the law, and much of the evil noted comes from the introduction within our borders {246} of an imperfectly assimilated foreign element which cherishes different views on the subject. Another deterrent cause is a cool common sense which has recognized the futility of trying to settle with blade or bullet differences which belong to the courts; to this may be added a keen sense of humor which has seen the absurdity and laughed the practice out of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... imperceptible pressure of encouragement—the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to—acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the point of strangling herself. This book so inflamed a naturally ardent imagination, that I was with difficulty dissuaded from entering the arena as a circus manager. Considerations of age or sex had no weight with me, and lack of capital eventually proved the deterrent force. On the shelf above were "Kenilworth," "The Lady of the Lake," and half of "Rob Roy." I have always hesitated to read the other half, for fear that it should not end precisely as I made it end when I was forced, by necessity, to supplement Sir Walter Scott. ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... them there have grown up two schools of criticism. The one maintains that form is everything, that not only is perfect form essential, and interesting material non-essential, but that actually interesting material is a deterrent to perfect expression, inasmuch as material from life, inherently imaginative, fantastic or romantic, is likely to make an author lazy and negligent and cause him to throw his whole dependence on objective facts rather ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... have thought the example of Berlin a great deterrent. The enlargement and embellishment of the Prussian capital, after the war of 1870, was attended by far greater roguery and wholesale swindling than even the previous transformation of Paris. Thousands of people too were ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... individual would come to the sanctuary,—to seek relief from bodily ills, to ward off blows of adversity, to pacify a deity who has manifested his or her displeasure. The expense involved—for the worshipper was not to appear empty-handed—would of itself act as a deterrent against too frequent visits ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... than theory, so prevention is better than cure, and there is little doubt that the fortification of that hill, in full view of many a Boer field-glass in the town, whence our movements were of course fully reported as frequently as possible to the enemy in the field, had a deterrent effect on any designs our very active foes might ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... less about his business there than he himself. That night he asked many questions of Shade Hawn, the proprietor, and all were answered freely, except where they bore on the feud of half a century, and then Gray encountered a silence that was puzzling but significant and deterrent. Next morning everybody who spoke to him called him by name, and as he rode up the river there was the look of recognition in every face he saw, for the news of him had gone ahead the night before. At the mouth of Hawn Creek, in a bend of the river, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... made of seaplane activities, which, round the European coasts involved in the War, never ceased. The submarine campaign found in the spotting seaplane its greatest deterrent, and it is old news now how even the deeply submerged submarines were easily picked out for destruction from a height and the news wirelessed from seaplane to destroyer, while in more than one place the seaplane itself finished the task by bomb dropping. It was a seaplane that ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... refuge, West Jersey never attained the success of Pennsylvania. The political disturbances and the continually threatened loss of self-government in both the Jerseys were a serious deterrent to Quakers who, above all else, prized rights which they found far better secured in Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys were united into one colony under a government appointed by the Crown, those rights were more restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey becoming a ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn't wish to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; had measured its odious, specious ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... that the people of Asia and of Africa may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites will not have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity; at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an unmistakable ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... of my early passion. I imagined she had debts, and when I now at last made up my mind to recall myself to her it was present to me that she might ask me to lend her money. More than anything else, however, at this time of day, I was sorry for her, so that such an idea didn't operate as a deterrent. ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... characterises Britannia's children seemed to be throwing out vigorous shoots in this new world." He perceived the obstacles to progress. The East India Company's charter, which prohibited trade between Sydney and India and the western coasts of America, was one of them. Convict labour was another deterrent. But he had vision, and found in the signs of development which he saw around him phenomena "highly interesting to the contemplator of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... cause the boy of to-day to visualize his own grandson, in the years to come, pointing the finger of scorn at him and calling down maledictions upon him because of a taint in the family blood, that picture will persist in his consciousness, and will prove a deterrent factor in his life. The desire for immortality is innate in every human breast, we are taught, but certainly no boy will wish to achieve that sort of immortality. He will not consider with complacency the possibility ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... the fear of war. It may take the form of (a) conscious visualization of the horrors of war, or (b) sub-conscious fear evidenced by excessive anxiety regarding the future. In either case it acts as a powerful deterrent from child-bearing, although it is doubtful whether those who are influenced by this fear would resort to abortion where ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... letter from our kinsman, Prince Banojik. After the usual compliments he announced to him that the suspicions which had arisen of my participation in the plots of the rebels had been proved to be but too well founded, adding that condign punishment as a deterrent should have overtaken me, but that the Tzarina, through consideration for the loyal service and white hairs of my father, had condescended to pardon the criminal son, and, remitting the disgrace-fraught execution, had condemned him to exile for life ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the success of the Great Experiment was such a doubt as exists in all enterprises which have great possibilities. To me, whose life was passed in a series of intellectual struggles, this form of doubt was a stimulus, rather than deterrent. What then was it that made for me a trouble, which became an anguish when my thoughts dwelt long ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker |
