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Primacy   Listen
noun
Primacy  n.  
1.
The state or condition of being prime or first, as in time, place, rank, etc., hence, excellency; supremacy. (R.)
2.
The office, rank, or character of a primate; the chief ecclesiastical station or dignity in a national church; the office or dignity of an archbishop; as, the primacy of England.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primacy" Quotes from Famous Books



... will appear to most readers paradoxical, if indeed it does not read as a contradiction in terms. A little thought, however, will show that it is just because we are all along assuming the economic primacy of the boy, that the girl has been so disastrously neglected. It is true that the boy is also a potential father, and that his training for that lofty function is usually ignored and will have to be borne in mind, ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... Some feeble attempts were even made to recover the Church property, but too many people's interests were concerned for much to be done in that direction. Dowdal, Archbishop of Armagh, who had been deprived, was restored to his primacy. Archbishop Brown and the other conforming bishops were deprived. So also were all married clergy, of whom there seem to have been but few; otherwise there was no great difference. As far as the right of exercising her supremacy was concerned, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... devil,—such were some of the prevailing views held in the early ages of the Church. The oldest doctrine is not certainly the truest; or, as Theodore Parker once said to a priest in Rome, who told him that the primacy of Peter was asserted in the second century, "A lie is no better because it ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... over this unfortunate treaty, if so invidious a term may be applied to the dignified utterances of diplomacy, it is unnecessary to give a detailed account. Our own country cannot but regret and resent any formal stipulations which fetter its primacy of influence and control on the American continent and in American seas; and the concessions of principle over-eagerly made in 1850, in order to gain compensating advantages which our weakness could not extort otherwise, must needs ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... of Treasurer. In the Rolls of Parliament, 26th November 1513, the Archbishop of Glasgow appears as Chancellor of the kingdom; and he secured to himself the rich Abbacies of Arbroath and Kilwinning. On succeeding to the Primacy of S. Andrew's, in 1522, he resigned the commendatory of Arbroath in favour of his nephew David Beaton, with the reservation to himself of half its revenues during his life. In a letter to Cardinal Wolsey, Dr. Magnus the English Ambassador, on the ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... the sovereigns of Shakespeare's time was Henry IV of France, unquestionably the greatest of French kings, despite the fact that the primacy has often been accorded to the Roi Soleil, Louis XIV. The powerful and ductile personality that was able to put an end to the destructive religious wars of France and to lay a firm foundation for the strongly-centralized ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... brilliant officers, Commander Samson and his band of brilliant pioneers, to whose endeavours, to whose enterprise, to whose devotion it is due that in an incredibly short space of time our naval aeroplane service has been raised to that primacy from which it must ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... lack of interest in public affairs has a deeper and far more reaching consequence. Everybody's business is nobody's business. In a community really democratic there are no natural leaders; none bound by rank, station, and recognized primacy, to originate resistance; none too strong to be crushed by the animosity of a Fiske or a Gould, or grievously wronged by a corrupt corporation like that of New York, a dishonest political organization like Tammany Hall, or a powerful Tramway or Railway ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... languages, that Greek and Latin have any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. You can give ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... of Lescar, some four and a half miles from the Chateau of Pau, with which it is said to have been at that time connected by a subterranean passage. Several of the Navarrese sovereigns had already been buried there, for the See was a kind of primacy, the Bishops being ex-officio presidents of ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... and endeavoured to divide barons from Churchmen by proclaiming that the latter should have free and undisturbed right of election when bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices were vacant. But the attempt failed. Langton was too resolute a statesman, and his conception of the primacy of Canterbury was too high for any turning back from the work he had set himself to accomplish. The rights of election in the Church were important, but the restoration of justice and order and the ending of tyranny were, in his eyes, hardly less important. John, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... eyes and goaded on his servant John Eccius, that notorious adversary of Christ, by the unchecked lust for fame, to drag me unexpectedly into the arena, trying to catch me in one little word concerning the primacy of the Church of Rome, which had fallen from me in passing. That boastful Thraso, foaming and gnashing his teeth, proclaimed that he would dare all things for the glory of God and for the honour of the holy apostolic seat; and, being puffed up respecting your power, which ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther

... formerly her mother's chaplain and the religious instructor of her own childhood, was designated by Elizabeth for the primacy. This eminent divine had likewise been one of the chaplains of Edward VI., and enjoyed under his reign considerable church preferments. He had been the friend of Cranmer, Bucer, Latimer, and Ridley; of Cook, Cheke, and Cecil; and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... to themselves: as, King Henry VIII., who, casting off the papal power and primacy, was vested with it himself within his own dominions, over the Church, accounting himself the fountain of all ecclesiastical power, (it being by statute law annexed to the crown,) and assuming to himself that papal title of supreme head ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London

... replied to Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet in a work called An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects. Nicholas Sanders (1527-1580), a Roman Catholic professor of Oxford, wrote The Rock of the Church, a defense of the primacy of Peter and the Bishops of Rome. Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a Jesuit, wrote several works in advocacy of Roman Catholicism ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... external discipline. But how different is the case with Catholics! We have many distinctive doctrines, such as the Real Presence in the Blessed Eucharist, the power of remitting sin, the Divine origin of the Church, and the primacy and infallibity of the Pope, all which it is our duty to learn and to believe. We are also bound to observe many precepts, to hear Mass, to pray and make the sign of the Cross, to go to confession, to fast and abstain, and to obey other commandments of the Church. If these ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... has been insisted that objects of every description are chosen only as they arouse some feeling; and that those which promise pleasant feeling are sought and those which entail pain are avoided. The general recognition of the primacy of pleasure and pain over our other feelings, over the specific emotions mentioned above, is indicated by the fact that ethical writers of eminence sometimes make pleasure and pain synonymous with feeling ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... American States we often find a curious and recurrent reflection of their origin. Virginia was the first of those colonies to come into existence, and we shall see her both as a colony and as a State long retaining a sort of primacy amongst them. She also retained, in the incidents of her history and in the characters of many of her great men, a colour which seems partly Elizabethan. Her Jefferson, with his omnivorous culture, his ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... contemporary writer, so I am told, regards originality as much rarer than is commonly supposed. But, on the contrary, is it not far more frequent than is commonly supposed? For one should not identify originality with mere primacy of conception or utterance, as if a thought could be original but once. In truth, it may be so thousands or millions of times; nay, from the beginning to the end of man's times upon the earth, the same thoughts may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... FACE.] You will accuse him! you will "bring him in Within the statute!" Who shall take your word? A whoreson, upstart, apocryphal captain, Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust So much as for a feather: [TO SUBTLE.] and you, too, Will give the cause, forsooth! you will insult, And claim a primacy in the divisions! You must be chief! as if you only had The powder to project with, and the work Were not begun out of equality? The venture tripartite? all things in common? Without priority? 'Sdeath! you perpetual curs, Fall to your couples again, and cozen ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson

... condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I cannot but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance and established primacy of the Tuscan. poets, concurring with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them had obtained from the same causes with ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... king. Whereby (and by other the like, as between John Stratford and Edward the Third, etc.) a man may easily conceive how proud the clergymen have been in former times, as wholly presuming upon the primacy of their pope. More matter could I allege of these and the like broils, not to be found among our common historiographers. Howbeit, reserving the same unto places more convenient, I will cease ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... least an approximation to ascribe the primacy of realism to Courbet, though ascriptions of the kind are at best approximations. Not only was he the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and importance of the actual world as it is and for what it is rather than for ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... Dutch rebels. There was always sympathy of thought and action between the Huguenots of France and their co-religionists in Holland. They were all believers alike in Calvinism—a sect inimical not less to temporal monarchies than to the sovereign primacy of the Church—and the tendency and purposes of the French rebels were already sufficiently manifest in their efforts, by means of the so-called cities of security, to erect a state within a state; to introduce, in short, a Dutch republic ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... trustful spirit, and straight-forward way. At Easter, 1070, a council was held at Winchester, at which he was summoned to attend. He was one of the five last Saxon Bishops; Stigand, who held both at once the primacy and the see of Winchester; his brother, Eghelmar, Bishop of Elmham; Eghelsie, of Selsey; and the Bishop of Durham, Eghelwin, who was in the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... America, following as it did so closely upon the development of the negro slave traffic, had given great impetus to it and, during the three succeeding centuries, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, English, and Dutch quickly became close rivals for an ignominious primacy in the most heinous of crimes. The highest figures I have found, assign to England one hundred and thirty vessels engaged in the trade, and forty-two thousand negroes landed in the Americas during the year 1786 from English ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... Elizabeth herself was a Protestant rather from policy than from firm conviction. James the First, in order to effect his favourite object of marrying his son into one of the great continental houses, was ready to make immense concessions to Rome, and even to admit a modified primacy in the Pope. Henry the Fourth twice abjured the reformed doctrines from interested motives. The Elector of Saxony, the natural head Of the Protestant party in Germany, submitted to become, at the most important crisis of the struggle, a tool ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... introduced as the head of the Church on earth, to foretell "the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their heighth" under Laud's primacy. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... King supported him. The remonstrance ended significantly with a call for a General Council. But he was presently engaged in a more serious quarrel. The King forced the monks of Canterbury, on the death of Edmund Rich, to elect the queen's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, to the primacy. He came and at once began to enrich himself, went "on visitation" through the country demanding money. The Dean of St. Paul's, Henry of Cornhill, shut the door in his face, Bishop Fulk approving. The old ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham

... at hand, patiently awaiting the answer to his demand, yet determined, in case of a refusal, to take his pastoral staff in his hand and enter the council room, announced or not. A more determined priest had never occupied the primacy, yet he was benevolent as determined, and, as we have mentioned, was known as Odo the Good amongst the poor. Stern and unyielding to the vices of the rich, he was gentle as a parent ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... the honesty of Archbishop Juvenal, and on the possibility of his having invented the whole story, and so for sinister purposes deceived Marcian and Pulcheria; just as he fabricated the writings which he forged for the purpose of securing the primacy of Palestine; a crime laid to the charge of Juvenal by Leo the Great, in his letter to Maximus, Bishop of Antioch. [P. 879. See Leo. vol. i. p. ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... [504] He hoped, he said, that he was not inclined to shrink from the service of the Church; but he was convinced that his present line of service was that in which he could be most useful. If he should be forced to accept so high and so invidious a post as the primacy, he should soon sink under the load of duties and anxieties too heavy for his strength. His spirits, and with his spirits his abilities, would fail him. He gently complained of Burnet, who loved and admired him with a truly generous heartiness, and who had laboured ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... our time, I quote from him his thought of sin, depravity, and punishment, as a hint of where the scientific spirit may yet aid us. "The doctrine of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man, the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgos subordinate to a benevolent Almighty who has only lately revealed Himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the liberal, popular illusions that ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell

... saints' reliques, holy water, consecrated salt, wax, &c.; to be sure to fast on Sundays, and eat flesh on Fridays; not to confess their sins, whatsoever they do, especially to a priest; to separate from the Catholic church, and despise his vicar's primacy; to attend the devill's nocturnal conventicles, sabbaths, and sacrifices; to take him for their god, worship, invoke, and obey him; to devote their children to him, and to labour all that they may to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various

... purpose a conference was an essential organ. How otherwise could the four nations reach any agreement? Yet the Bulgarians—army, government, and nation—were obsessed by the fixed idea that Bulgaria enjoyed not only a primacy in this matter but a sort of sovereign monopoly by virtue of which it was her right and privilege to determine how much of the common spoils she should assign Servia (with whom she had an ante-bellum treaty), and, after Servia had been eliminated, ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman

... dignity, that, properly speaking, he is not merely constituted in dignity, but is rather placed on the very summit of dignities. Hence, also, the Pope is rather father of fathers, and he alone can use this name, because he only can be called father of fathers: since he possesses the primacy over all, is truly greater than all, and the greatest of all. He is called most holy, because he is presumed to be such. On account of the excellency of his supreme dignity, he is called bishop of bishops, ordinary of ordinaries, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... brought back into the property of the Church and restored to it twenty-five manors." He also added one hundred to the original number of the monks, and drew up a new system of discipline to correct the laxity which was rife when he entered on the primacy. He tells Anselm in a letter that "the land in which he is, is daily shaken with so many and so great tribulations, is stained with so many adulteries and other impurities, that no order of men consults for the benefit of his soul, or even desires to hear the salutary doctrine of God for ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers

... the independent state of Vatican City and granted Roman Catholicism special status in Italy. In 1984, a concordat between the Holy See and Italy modified certain of the earlier treaty provisions, including the primacy of Roman Catholicism as the Italian state religion. Present concerns of the Holy See include religious freedom, international development, the Middle East, terrorism, interreligious dialogue and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... seclusion of his little favourite abbey in Normandy: where he afterwards opened a school, the celebrity of which was acknowledged throughout Europe. From being a pedagogue, let us trace him in his virtuous career to the primacy of England; and when we read of his studious and unimpeachable behaviour, as head of the see of Canterbury,[247] let us acknowledge that a love of books and of mental cultivation is among the few comforts in this world of which neither craft nor ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Catholic official James Lilienstayn drew up an interesting list of their errors. It seems that their cardinal tenet was the supremacy of Scripture, without gloss, tradition, or interpretation by the Fathers of the church. They rejected the primacy of the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy of masses for the dead and the validity ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... Michael Angelo could not very well believe in Julius II or Leo X, or in much that they believed in; but he could paint the Superman three hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won the primacy among all modern painters and sculptors solely by his power of shewing us superhuman persons. On the strength of his decoration and color alone he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... (Anstoss), which impels the ego back upon itself?" cannot be solved, since it is only through the opposition that it itself arises. The "deduction of the opposition," which the theoretical part of the Science of Knowledge did not furnish, is to be looked for from the practical part. The primacy of practical reason, already emphasized by Kant, gives us the answer: The ego limits itself and is theoretical, in order to be practical. The whole machinery of representation and the represented world exists only to furnish us the possibility ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... of equal income to be of more or less value to the purchaser, according as they are circumstanced. For instance, The lands of the primacy and some other sees, are let so low, that they hardly pay a fifth penny of the real value to the bishop, and there the fines are the greater. On the contrary, the sees of Meath and Clonfert, consisting, as I am told, much of tithes, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... authorities; they thought it insidious. I happen still to have a correspondence, in which the chief place is filled by one of the most eminent bishops of the day, a theologian and reader of the Fathers, a moderate man, who at one time was talked of as likely to have the reversion of the Primacy. A young clergyman in his diocese became a Catholic; the papers at once reported on authority from "a very high quarter," that, after his reception, "the Oxford men had been recommending him to retain his living." I had reasons for thinking that the allusion ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... detached fragment of Greek power survived in the last-named country, the kingdom of Trebizond. As for Europe, it had become the main scene of Osmanli operations, and now contained the administrative capital, Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental primacy. Sultan Murad, who some years after his succession in 1359 had definitely transferred the centre of political gravity to Thrace, was nevertheless carried to the Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria, Serbia, and districts of both Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... English. The important thing is that those who speak English, whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind. In this noble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that claimants for the prize will be too ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. Persuasion—which appeared with Northanger Abbey and which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene—has also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most sustained work. And this, like Emma, resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting" story, of glaring ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... Talcott would have been astonished, indeed, could he have measured his influence after a century by the numbers, collateral and direct, who were proud to use his name. There were Talcott Joneses, and Talcott Robinsons, and Talcott Browns by the score in town, but one and all they acknowledged the primacy of this Edward Herbert Talcott, and never lost an opportunity of speaking of him as their cousin. He had written, I learned afterward, a monograph on his great-grandfather, which had given him a certain literary distinction ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... The primacy of Ra is illustrated by the fact that Amon was identified with him. Amon, originally the local god of Thebes,[1253] became great in the South as Ra became great in the North, rising with the growth of the Theban kingdom. His hold on the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... established the reign of law throughout a powerful realm. Though wars and turmoils almost without end were a heavy drain upon Gallic vitality for many generations, France achieved steady progress to primacy in the arts of peace. None but a marvellous people could have made such efforts without exhaustion, yet even now in the twentieth century the astounding vigor of this race has not ceased to ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... Horace and Quintilian give a kind of primacy of honour to Lucilius amongst the Latin satirists; for as the Roman language grew more refined, so much more capable it was of receiving the Grecian beauties, in his time. Horace and Quintilian could mean no more than that ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... of Babylon from B.C. 647 to 626. If this be so, we must place in the later years of the reign of Asshur-bani-pal the commencement of Assyria's decline—the change whereby she passed from the assailer to the assailed, from the undisputed primacy of Western Asia to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson



Words linked to "Primacy" :   grandness, importance



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