abridges

Updated: May 6, 2025

Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want.

Charles Edwyn Vaughan - English literary criticism

If it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man will defend it by the Gospel: if it abridges human freedom, we know that another will find precedents for it in the Revolution. In the name of Heaven, what are we to gain by suffering Ireland to be rode by that faction which now predominates over it?

Sydney Smith - Peter Plymley's Letters, and selected essays

Two hundred and fourscore writers, historians, orators, philosophers, theologians, are reviewed without any regular method: he abridges their narrative or doctrine, appreciates their style and character, and judges even the fathers of the church with a discreet freedom, which often breaks through the superstition of the times.

Edward Gibbon - History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 5