"Dead letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stroked mi heead, "Tak my advice, young chap," he sed, "Let liquors be, sup ale asteead, An' tha'll be better, An' dunnot treat th' advice tha's heard Like a dead letter." ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... though it has always been a dead letter in Groveland. In fact, it was the law when you got married, and until I introduced a bill in the legislature last fall to repeal it. But even that law did n't hit cases like yours. It was unlawful ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... hurting any person by such infernal arts." A similar statute was contained in the "Fundamentals" of Massachusetts, probably inspired by the command of Scripture, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This law, we shall see, was not a dead letter. ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... state institutions intrusted with the care or custody of habitual criminals, idiots, epileptics, imbeciles or insane, an "habitual criminal" being defined as "a person who has been convicted of some felony involving moral turpitude." It has been a dead letter ever since it was placed on the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... and subsequently returned to the religion of his fathers, was beheaded at Constantinople. The Christian powers of Europe immediately remonstrated, and it was hoped that the law against apostates from Mohammedanism would be permitted to become a dead letter. In a few months, however, a firman issued from the government ordering the decapitation of a young man near Brooza, who was put to death for having promised in a passion, but had afterwards refused, to become a Mohammedan. Lord Aberdeen, the British Secretary ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
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