Word: retort
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...year, the gasworks had already spread to within a quarter of a mile of Christ Church, had ruined the view of Folly Bridge, was besmirching Pembroke College with smoke and soot. As if that were not enough, the company announced that it was about to build a new gas retort, 92 ft. high. With that, townsmen, gownsmen, and the entire city council rose in wrath...
...this argument the lawyer-moralist has a stern retort. First of all, punishment is an administrative necessity-an indispensable safeguard of civilized society. More important, "to condemn and punish offenders, to insist on their responsibility ... is a phase of ... bracing strictness which has an irreplaceable educational value . . . With any individual, simply to accept his temperament and character as they are, and his impulses as they come, is death to moral progress . . . It is also disastrous to lead [a delinquent] to believe that he is more sinned against than sinning and to imply that strenuous moral effort on his own part...
...greater men, like Voltaire and Pope, but his satiric wit was to theirs as a mosquito bite to a wasp's sting. Offered the chance to sponsor Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, he muffed it so badly that years later an embittered Johnson rebuffed him with a classic retort: "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and. when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help...
Bargaining Point. White with anger, Clement Attlee leaped to his feet in protest. "Be careful about this," he warned. "We agreed to the stationing of American bombers in this country . . . but never specifically as a base for using the atomic bomb against Russia." Churchill's retort: "That is the impression which, however mistakenly, they [the Americans] seem to have derived...
...Russian charges that the U.S. was arming for war, the U.S. had retorted that it was arming only because it had to. Last week's offer was to quit arming-if the Russians would quit too. By his retort, Vishinsky proved, if it needed proving again, that U.S. rearmament is not a matter of choice but of harsh necessity...