Word Finder - vices

definition

A bad habit.

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Gluttony is a vice, not a virtue.

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Any of various crimes related (depending on jurisdiction) to prostitution, pornography, gambling, alcohol, or drugs.

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A defect in the temper or behaviour of a horse, such as to make the animal dangerous, to injure its health, or to diminish its usefulness.

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A mechanical screw apparatus used for clamping or holding (also spelled vise).

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A tool for drawing lead into cames, or flat grooved rods, for casements.

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A grip or grasp.

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A winding or spiral staircase.

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One who acts in place of a superior.

His vices were rather of the sordid than of the satanic order.

Hated for his vices, Demetrius fell in battle against the usurper, Alexander Balas, in 150 B.C.

One of these, the Dialogue against Hypocrites, was aimed in a spirit of vindictive hatred at the vices of ecclesiastics; another, written at the request of Nicholas V., covered the anti-pope Felix with scurrilous abuse.

Though at first written consecutively, the work is now usually divided into three portions, - a preface, the history proper, and an epistle, - the last, which is largely made up of passages and texts of Scripture brought together for the purpose of condemning the vices of his countrymen and their rulers, being the least important, though by far the longest of the three.

The first two are nothing more than the absence of all visible form and organization; the third degree is the abode of darkness; whilst the remaining seven are " the seven infernal halls," occupied by the demons, who are the incarnation of all human vices.

His first book, The Perpetuity of a Regenerate Man's Estate (1627), defended one of the main Calvinistic positions, and The Unloveliness of Love-locks and Health's Sickness (1628) attacked prevailing fashions without any sense of proportion, treating follies on the same footing as scandalous vices.

It includes dissertations on the various vices and virtues, the different arts and sciences, and carries down the history of the world to the sojourn in Egypt.

As an administrator Philip had all the vices of his type, that of the laborious, self-righteous man, who thinks he can supervise everything, is capable of endless toil, and jealous of his authority, and who therefore will let none of his servants act without his instructions.

There were no poor in his dominions, no thief or robber, no flatterer or miser, no dissensions, no lies, and no vices.

Further, he not only created a style of his own, but, instead of taking the substance of his writings from Greek poetry, or from a remote past, he treated of the familiar matters of daily life, of the politics, the wars, the administration of justice, the eating and drinking, the money-making and money-spending, the scandals and vices, which made up the public and private life of Rome in the last quarter of the and century B.C. This he did in a singularly frank, independent and courageous spirit, with no private ambition to serve, or party cause to advance, but with an honest desire to expose the iniquity or incompetence of the governing body, the sordid aims of the middle class, and the corruption and venality of the city mob.

There was nothing of stoical austerity or of rhetorical indignation in the tone in which he treated the vices and follies of his time.

The one in the council chamber upstairs dates from 1527 and gives an allegorical representation of the Virtues and the Vices.

When the states-general met, Marat's interest was as great as ever, and in June 1789 he published a supplement to his Offrande, followed in July by La constitution, in which he embodies his idea of a constitution for France, and in September by his Tableau des vices de la constitution d'Angleterre, which he presented to the Assembly.

Inscriptions of later date state that it was only a vices of the Viennese province, while mentioning the fact that a gild of boatmen flourished there.

The third and fourth books, like the larger part of the second, treat of ethics; the third, of virtues and vices, in pairs; the fourth, of more general ethical and political subjects, frequently citing extracts to illustrate the pros and cons of a question in two successive chapters.

In it he depicts the struggle of Christendom with paganism under the allegory of a struggle between the Christian virtues and the pagan vices.

After a laudatory account of the past conduct of the Corinthian Church, he enters upon a denunciation of vices and a praise of virtues, and illustrates his various topics by copious citations from the Old Testament scriptures.

They are as a rule frugal, industrious and lawabiding, and are feared rather for their virtues than for their vices.

Then at the end of the moral virtues justice is treated at inordinate length, and in a different manner from the others, which are regarded as means between two vices, whereas justice appears as a mean only because it is of the middle between too much and too little.

These acts, which the vices of Alphonso had rendered necessary, were sanctioned by the Cortes in 1668.

Their moral character, when first visited by Europeans, was not superior to that of other islanders; and excepting when improved and preserved by the influence of Christianity, it has suffered much from the vices of intemperance and licentiousness introduced by foreigners.

The spirit of chivalry implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virtues to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are forgotten.

Against these may be set the vices of pride, ostentation, love of bloodshed, contempt of inferiors, and loose manners.

The chief difficulties in the way of evangelization have been (1) the hostility of natives races aroused by European annexations, (2) the introduction of European vices, (3) the movement known as Ethiopianism.

But while it may be admitted that Gregory was inclined to be unduly subservient to the great, so that at times he was willing to shut his eyes to the vices and even the crimes of persons of rank; yet it cannot fairly be denied that his character as a whole was singularly noble and unselfish.

Though free from the grosser vices of his predecessors, a man of taste, and economical without being avaricious, Clement VII.

Among the people there was no public opinion to discourage despotism; the majority accepted their lot as inevitable, and tried rather to reproduce than to restrain the vices of their rulers.

Believing in the perfectibility of the race, that there are no innate principles, and therefore no original propensity to evil, he considered that "our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world."

What may be called the modern " art " current, with its virtues and vices, is as strong in Denmark as in England.

His fiery zeal could not blind him to the vices of the court, and heedless of personal danger he thundered against the profane honours that were addressed almost within the precincts of St Sophia to the statue of the empress.

This little treatise stands almost alone in Proverbs; the great mass of its aphorisms relate to vices and faults which, though possible in any tolerably well-organized community, were specially prominent in the cities in which the Jews dwelt after the conquests of Alexander.

In 1830 he was rector of the university; and in his speech at the tricentenary of the Augsburg Confession in that year he charged the Catholic Church with regarding the virtues of the pagan world as brilliant vices, and giving the crown of perfection to poverty, continence and obedience.

In this manner he gained the favour of Nero, whom he aided and abetted in his vices and cr"elties.

Thus, preserved alike from foreign invasion and from domestic rebellion, the long line of subsequent nawabs had given way to that neglect of public affairs and those private vices which naturally flow from irresponsible power.

In 323 Constantine, tempted by the "advanced age and unpopular vices" of his colleague, again declared war against him, and, having defeated his army at Adrianople (3rd of July 323), succeeded in shutting him up within the walls of Byzantium.

Compared with the results of English or Dutch colonization the conversion and civilization of the Filipinos is a most remarkable achievement s Notwithstanding the undeniable vices, follies and absurd illiberalities of the Spanish colonial regime, the Philippines were the only group in the East Indies that improved in civilization in the three centuries following their discovery.

When he came of age, he was obliged to wrest from her by force that power which her vices and incapacity had rendered disastrous to the state.

The disgust aroused by the vices and effeminacy of the king increased the popularity of Henry of Guise.

In April 1787 Madison had written a paper, The Vices of the Political System of the United States, and from his study of confederacies, ancient and modern, later summed up in numbers 17, 18, and 19 of The Federalist, he had concluded that no confederacy could long endure if it acted upon states only and not directly upon individuals.

His reign was inaugurated by the murder of his mother, and he was always under the dominion of favourites, male and female, who indulged his vices and conducted the government as they pleased.

It is clear from Guicciardini's autobiographical memoirs that he was ambitious, calculating, avaricious and power-loving from his earliest years; and in Spain he had no more than an opportunity of studying on a large scale those political vices which already ruled the minor potentates of Italy.

It is not merely that he was ambitious, cruel, revengeful and avaricious, for these vices have existed in men far less antipathetic than Guicciardini.

This is apparent to all students of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the profoundest analysts of their age, the bitterest satirists of its vices, but themselves infected with its incapacity for moral goodness.

He received instruction in mathematics from Hobbes, and was early initiated into all the vices of the age by Buckingham and Percy.

Halifax, however, concludes by desiring to moderate the roughness of his picture by emphasizing the excellence of his intellect and memory and his mechanical talent, by deprecating a too censorious judgment and by dwelling upon the disadvantages of his bringing up, the difficulties and temptations of his position, and on the fact that his vices were those common to human frailty.

This feeling explains his detestation of foreign manners and superstitions, his loathing not only of inhuman crimes and cruelties but even of the lesser derelictions from selfrespect, his scorn of luxury and of art as ministering to luxury, his mockery of the poetry and of the stale and dilettante culture of his time, and perhaps, too, his indifference to the schools of philosophy and his readiness to identify all the professors of stoicism with the reserved and close-cropped puritans, who concealed the worst vices under an outward appearance of austerity.

But the worst vices of the Inquisition were the widespread system of delation it encouraged by paying informers out of the property of the condemned, and its action as a trading and landholding association.

It has been said of the mestizos elsewhere that they inherit the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.

Livy writes as a Roman, to raise a monument worthy of the greatness of Rome, and to keep alive, for the guidance and the warning of Romans, the recollection alike of the virtues which had made Rome great and of the vices which had threatened her with destruction.

It is in the highest degree natural that Livy should have sought for the secret of the rise of Rome, not in any large historical causes, but in the moral qualities of the people themselves, and that he should have looked upon the contemplation of these as the best remedy for the vices of his own degenerate days.