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Rule out   /rul aʊt/   Listen
Rule out

verb
1.
Make impossible, especially beforehand.  Synonyms: close out, preclude.
2.
Include or exclude by determining judicially or in agreement with rules.  Synonym: rule in.
3.
Dismiss from consideration or a contest.  Synonyms: eliminate, reject, winnow out.  "This possibility can be eliminated from our consideration"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rule out" Quotes from Famous Books



... the morality of woman has now been reached. It has, however, still to be pointed out that we may appropriately, in comparing the morals of man and woman, confine our survey to a comparatively narrow field. That is to say, we may here rule out all that relates to purely personal and domestic morality—for this is not relevant to the suffrage. And we may also rule out all that relates to offences against the police laws—such as public drunkenness ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... divine mission of a genius to bring order out of chaos, to regulate matters with the directing force of his superior glance. Certainly, Shakspere, from the very beginning of his activity, sought, with all the energy of his power, to rule out all ignoble, anarchical elements from the stage, and thus to obtain for it the sympathies of the best of his time. Fate so willed it, that one of the greatest minds which Heaven ever gave to mankind, entered, on this occasion, the modest door of a playhouse, as if Providence ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... he does," he said. "He knows. Mr. Tenderfoot, there's a rule out here among white men in the Nation that you can't shoot a man when he's with a woman. I never knew it to be broke yet. You can't do it. You've got to get him in a gang of men or by himself. That's why. He knows it, too. We ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... didn't know the distances? And why can't he look a man in the face? And why should the boy have said it was he if it wasn't? Of course, if you think well of him you're right to keep him. But you may take it as a rule out here that when a man has been dismissed it hasn't been done for nothing. Men treated that way should travel out of the country. It's better for all parties. It isn't here as it is at home, where people live so thick together that nothing ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope

... and its meaning, there need be no quarrel over that term. Let us rule out such accidents as when a weak book becomes widely known because it is supposed to be indecent, or because it is the first to embody popular propaganda, or because its hero is identified with an important figure of real life, or for any other casual reason. If a novel, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... an anomalous complex of both these, and of innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not to this newly devised one: King Louis Restorer of French Liberty? Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd. But then if there be no living energy; living passivity only? King Serpent, hurled into his unexpected watery dominion, did at least bite, and assert credibly that he was there: but as for the poor ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... not-pink region one comes to the Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the NOT classes meet in that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is infinite space and infinite time and any being of infinite qualities; and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about any NOT things. I will not deal with not things at all, except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use it as one often uses "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"—or ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... open, pleasant smile, "that a man may be great about a'most anything chopping wood, if he happens to be in that line. I used to go upon that plan, Sir. Whatever I have set my hand to do, I have done it as well as I knew how to; and if you follow that rule out you'll not be idle nor humdrum neither. Many's the time that I have mowed what would be a day's work for another ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... if he want charity and love to his brethren, if he overstretch that point of conscience to the breach of Christian affection, and duties flowing from it, it profits him nothing. Then certainly charity must rule out external actions, and have the predominant hand in the use of all gifts, in the venting of all opinions. Whatsoever knowledge and ability a man hath, charity must employ it, and use it. Without this, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... to fight the fire. (This time the Judge did not rule out the word.) Then his rifle had exploded in his hands, the bullet going just past his ear. The charge had scorched his neck. It was a simple story. The thing might have happened. It was entirely credible. There were no contradictions ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... anthropologist should think that a scientific view of man is to be obtained by leaving out the human nature in him. This comes from the over-anxiety of evolutionary history to arrive at general principles. It is too ready to rule out the so-called "accident," forgetful of the fact that the whole theory of biological evolution may with some justice be described as "the happy accident theory." The man of high individuality, then, the exceptional man, the man of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, or man of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject" doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic pleasure, that which is always present in favour of ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... between God and men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. It is the "otherness," not the sameness, which makes Him desirable and potent in the daily round of life. A purely ethical interest in God ceases to be ethical and becomes complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenal we have shut the door on the chief strength ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... "expenditure of superfluous activity," "a mending, restoring of strength, a recuperation," "an apprenticeship, a preliminary exercise for the active functions of life and for the development of our natural gifts."[38] The last position, due to Groos, does not rule out the other two; it holds the first valid for the young, the second for adults; but it comprehends both in a more ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot



Words linked to "Rule out" :   obviate, rule, rid of, decree



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