noun
definition
The feeling, or spirit of being defiant.
definition
Open or bold resistance to or disregard for authority, opposition, or power.
definition
A challenging attitude or behaviour; challenge.
Examples of defiance in a Sentence
There was challenge and defiance in her gaze.
Aggravated by her second display of defiance in one night, he crossed to her and planted his hands on either side of her chair, demanding her attention.
The leading British ship, the "Defiance" (74), carrying the flag of Rear-Admiral Graves, anchored just south of the Trekroner.
The blatant defiance was so sweetly uttered, he didn't know how to respond.
She stood, meeting his gaze with defiance.
In defiance of treaties, however, the Porte continued to change the hospodars almost yearly and to exact extraordinary installation presents.
The attitude of the Church was practically one of defiance.
It was in defiance of this right that Alva refused the claim of Counts Egmont and Horn to be tried by the knights of the Fleece in 1568.
When the Burgesses undertook in May 1769 to declare in vigorous resolutions that the right and power of taxation, direct and indirect, rested with the local assembly, the governor hastily dissolved them, but only to find the same men assembling in the Raleigh tavern in Williamsburg and issuing forth their resolutions in defiance of executive authority.
But the Slavophil movement, with its motto, " one law, one church, one tongue," acquired great influence in official circles, and its aim was, in defiance of the pledges of successive tsars, to subject Finland to Orthodoxy and autocracy.
His reign was marked by a troublesome war with the Paulician heretics, an inheritance from his predecessor; the death of their able chief Chrysochir led to the definite subjection of this little state, of which the chief stronghold was Tephrice on the upper Euphrates, and which the Saracens had helped to bid a long defiance to the government of Constantinople.
Thereupon, in defiance of the archbishop, the abbe Baradere gave him the viaticum, while the rite of extreme unction was administered by the abbe Guillon, an opponent of the civil constitution, without consulting the archbishop or the parish cure.
It was not a religious movement; and though, as a defiance of the accepted theology, its character was mainly theological, the deistical crusade belongs, not to the history of the church, or of dogma, but to the history of general culture.
Martin McGuinness - his chief co-conspirator - has been shouting defiance on television North and South at democratic politicians.
We have a right to expect that sentences will reflect the damage done to our social fabric by wilful defiance of the law.
His paintings, with their unexpected juxtaposition of objects, are a deliberate defiance of common sense.
It does this in virtue of a higher Law and in apparent defiance of the lower.
Bush may well see this continued defiance by the people of Falluja as something that needs to be crushed.
The Boston Tea Party was an act of open defiance against the British state, at that time the most powerful in the world.
The text sought permission and voiced defiance.
Excommunication and interdict (April 17, 1606) were met with defiance.
Here, on the 3rd of August 1795, General Wayne, the year after his victory over the Indians at Fallen Timbers, concluded with them the treaty of Greenville, the Indians agreeing to a cessation of hostilities and ceding to the United States a considerable portion of Ohio and a number of small tracts in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan (including the sites of Sandusky, Toledo, Defiance, Fort Wayne, Detroit, Mackinac, Peoria and Chicago), and the United States agreeing to pay to the Indians $20,000 worth of goods immediately and an annuity of goods, valued at $9500, for ever.
This sufficed to provoke the defiance of the Danes, and on the 1st of February 1864 the Austrian and D h Prussian troops crossed the Eider.
The proclamation of the new Joseph, emperor was a gage of defiance thrown down to Magyars 1848.
The announcement of his determination caused the Opposition to rally against him, and when on the 18th of November the Liberal party adopted a " guillotine " motion by a show of hands in defiance of orthodox procedure, a section of the party seceded.
In defiance of promises to the British government, orders were transmitted from Constantinople to Husain Pasha, the Turkish high admiral, to ensnare and put to death the principal beys.
He cast out the spirit of negation, and henceforth the temper of his misery was changed to one, not of " whining," but of " indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance."
In defiance of her commercial interests and of her popularity with the Moslem population of the Gulf, Great Britain set herself to suppress the trade, and executed a series of agreements with the chiefs of the Arabian littoral with this object.
In defiance of the law a gymnasium was set up under the shadow of the citadel.
The polity of the new community, often founded in defiance of the home authorities, might either be a copy of that just left behind or be its direct political antithesis.
With a few followers he escaped to Ireland, where his position as lordlieutenant was confirmed by an Irish parliament, and he ruled in full defiance of the English government.
After the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards in the 16th century the natives were subjected to much tyranny and oppression, though it must in fairness be said that much of it was carried out in defiance of the efforts and the wishes of the Spanish home government, whose legislative efforts to protect the Indians from serfdom and ill-usage met with scant respect at the hands of the distant settlers and mine-owners, who bid defiance to the humane and protective regulations of the council of the Indies, and treated the unhappy natives little better than beasts of burden.
His rival Athanaric seems to have tried to maintain his party for a while north of the Danube in defiance of the Huns; but he had presently to follow the example of the great mass of the nation.
Nor did he see that the passion for equality, like every great passion, justified itself, and that the problem was, not how to obtain liberty in defiance of it, but how so to guide it as to obtain liberty by it and through it.
The unreflective moral consciousness never finds it difficult to distinguish between a man's power of willing and all the forces of circumstance, heredity and the like, which combine to form the temptations to which he may yield or bid defiance; and such facts as " remorse " and " penitence " are a continual testimony to man's sense of freedom.
Not twenty years after Luther's defiance of the pope, the startling thesis " that all that Aristotle taught was false " was prosperously maintained by the youthful Ramus before the university of Paris; and almost contemporaneously the group of remarkable thinkers in Italy who heralded the dawn of modern physical science - Cardanus, Telesio, Patrizzi, Campanella, Bruno - began to propound their Aristotelian theories of the constitution of the physical universe.
The war began, like every feudal war of that day, with a solemn defiance, and it was soon characterized by terrible disasters.
In every country there is an upland or outfield territory, which will always bid defiance to agriculture.
The conference showed defiance by voting in favor of linking the basic pensions with average earnings.
If I had been in their shoes and someone else had been in mine, I would have voted to continue the defiance.
We've shown that for regimes that choose defiance, there are serious consequences.
Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corruption.
Yet it too has stood firm, shoulder to shoulder with its neighbors, resolute in its defiance of the Dark.
In defiance of the rain he was stalking among the horses, wrapped in an old scotch plaid.
They were probably not definite massed movements, such as would permit of the survival of distinctive lines of custom between tribe and tribe; but rather spasmodic movements, sometimes of tribes or of groups, sometimes only of families or even couples, the first caused by tribal wars, the second to escape punishment for some offence against tribal law, such as the defiance of the rules as to clan-marriages.
On the charge of majestas (high treason) incurred by having left his province for Egypt without the consent of the senate and in defiance of the Sibylline books, he was acquitted; it is said that the judges were bribed, and even Cicero, who had recently attacked Gabinius with the utmost virulence, was persuaded by Pompey to say as little as he could in his evidence to damage his former enemy.
As foreign minister of a young state which had attained unity in defiance of the most formidable religious organization in the world and in opposition to the traditional policy of France, it could but be ViscontiVenostas aim to uphold the dignity of his country while convincing European diplomacy that United Italy was an element of order and progress, and that the spiritual independence of the Roman pontiff had suffered no diminution.
But, when the zeal of Epiphanius was kindled against him, when Jerome, alarmed about his own reputation, and in defiance of his past attitude, turned against his once honoured teacher, and Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, found it prudent, for political reasons, and out of consideration for the uneducated monks, to condemn Origen - then his authority received a shock from which it never recovered.
His daily attacks on the Mountain resulted, on the 15th of April 1793, in a demand by the commune for his exclusion from the assembly, but, undaunted, when the Parisian populace invaded the Chamber on the 2nd of June, Lanjuinais renewed his defiance of the victorious party.
Eighteen years later, in 1638, it was besieged by Sultan Murad IV., with an army of 300,000 men and, after an obstinate resistance, forced to surrender, when, in defiance of the terms of capitulation, most of the inhabitants were massacred.