Peremptory Quotes & Sayings

Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, unnecessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be explained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover. — Rabindranath Tagore

So defendants like Walter McMillian, even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent black, frequently found themselves staring at all-white juries, especially in death penalty cases. Then, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors could be challenged more directly about using peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner, giving hope to black defendants - and forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude black jurors. — Bryan Stevenson

The three quarters began. The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one and that's it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark instead of lying there trying not to think of the swing until all cedars came to have that vivid dead smell of perfume that Benjy hated so. — William Faulkner

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Something that he wants to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle and lights a cigarette, just to hold me up. — E.B. White

Stand ipecacuanha, and which of them were constitutionally unable to retain that powerful drug. One who lay dead he ordered to be carried out. He spoke in the sharp, peremptory manner of a man who would take no nonsense, and the well men who obeyed his orders scowled malignantly. One muttered deep in his chest as he took the corpse by the feet. The white man exploded in speech and action. It cost him a painful effort, but his arm shot out, landing — Jack London

Possession of the box conferred a kind of power on the wielder
which was that anyone, confronted with the hypnotic glass eye, would submissively obey the most peremptory orders about stance and expression. — Terry Pratchett

A book a week I heave a sigh;
That Slogan's peremptory cry
I will not hear, I will not heed.
How can They say that I should need
The book They bid me weekly buy?
But Slogans change, as days go by;
My Psyche listens, fluttering shy,
To newer message "Come and Read
A book a week."
To read! to read! O wings that fly
O'er sun-kissed lands, through clouded sky
That bear us on where Great ones lead!
I too must follow, so I plead
For magic wings. I'll read (or try)
A book a week! — Alexander Ireland

God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third. — George Eliot

I said, Quiet!"
Tiffany was so much startled by this peremptory reminder that she gasped, and stood staring up at the Nonesuch as though she could not believe that he was speaking not to his cousin, but actually to her. She drew in her breath audibly, and clenched her hands. Miss Trent cast a look of entreaty at sir Waldo, but he ignored it. He strolled up to the infuriated beauty, and pushed up her chin.
"Now, you may listen to me, my child!" he said sternly. "You are becoming a dead bore, and I don't tolerate bores. Neither do I tolerate noisy tantrums. Unless you want to be soundly smacked, enact me no ill-bred scenes!"
There was a moment's astonished silence. Laurence broke it, seizing his cousin's hand, and fervently shaking it.
"I knew you was a right one!" he declared. "A great gun, Waldo! Damme, a Trojan! — Georgette Heyer

The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said, partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down — Raymond Chandler

Why, that is nothing: for I tell you, father,
I am as peremptory as she proud-minded;
And where two raging fires meet together
They do consume the thing that feeds their fury:
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all:
So I to her and so she yields to me;
For I am rough and woo not like a babe. — William Shakespeare

Man seeks, in his manhood, not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Crooked things may be as stiff and unflexible as streight: and Men may be as positive and peremptory in Error as in Truth. — John Locke

Benevolence is often very peremptory. — W. Somerset Maugham

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. — Susan Choi

Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely. — Thurgood Marshall

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows
in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain
in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine
it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. — George Eliot

It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love
this hunger of the heart
as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world. — George Eliot

I didn't bring my peremptory tone to bear in regard to what you'd just said about the unnecessariness of sleep but only, only, mind you, because of the fact that I absolutely, simply, purely and without any whatevers have to sleep now, I mean, man, my eyes are closing, they're redhot, sore, tired, beat ... — Jack Kerouac

The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries - it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender. For many African Americans, the use of wholly discretionary peremptory strikes to select a jury of twelve remained a serious barrier to serving on a jury. — Bryan Stevenson

The States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; to denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms; to protest against them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments or precedents of rights, but as a temporary yielding to the lesser evil, until their accumulation shall overweigh that of separation. — Thomas Jefferson

Avuncular authority. In an abrupt, an almost peremptory letter, he laid his case, — Lytton Strachey