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Palliative   /pˈæliətɪv/   Listen
Palliative

adjective
1.
Moderating pain or sorrow by making it easier to bear.  Synonyms: alleviative, alleviatory, lenitive, mitigative, mitigatory.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Palliative" Quotes from Famous Books



... observe that the Beauty of this Epigram is different from that of any in the foregoing. An Irony is look'd upon as the finest Palliative of Praise; and very often conveys the noblest Panegyrick under the Appearance of Satire. Homer is here seemingly accused and treated as a Plagiary; but what is drawn up in the form of an Accusation is certainly, as my Correspondent observes, the greatest Compliment ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the nature of the problem will show that present methods of dispensing justice, giving charity, dealing with defectives and working for social betterment need careful examination and numerous modifications, if they are not to be ineffectual or merely palliative, or worse still, if they are not to give temporary relief at the cost of greatly aggravating the social disease in ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... This palliative, which had no risks for innocence so sincerely regained, soon lost its effect. The convent-boarder viewed her protector's dinners with disgust, had a religious aversion for the theatre, and relapsed ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... another the expedients of reform to head off the increasing threat of this one party's progress towards the revolutionary ideal. But this one party would have no more need to waste its time upon palliative measures than it would have to soil itself with the dirt of practical politics and the bargain counter. The other parties would do all that and do it well. The one party would be concerned with nothing but making converts to its philosophy and preparing for the revolution ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... a thunderbolt; the Baron could read in it the intestine warfare between civil and military authorities, which to this day hampers the Government, and he was required to invent on the spot some palliative for the difficulty that stared him in the face. He desired the soldier to come back next day, dismissing him with splendid promises of promotion, and he returned to the drawing-room. "Good-day and good-bye, brother," said he to the Marshal.—"Good-bye, children.—Good-bye, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... As a palliative to this rash arrogance, people are in the habit of giving way on everything. If two intrepid persons meet, and neither will give way, the slightest difference may cause a shower of abuse, then fisticuffs, and, finally, a fatal blow: so that it would really be a ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer

... question. There again came the difficulty when the genius and patriotism of Henry Clay were brought into requisition and a joint resolution introduced by him and adopted by both houses was productive of a satisfactory solution for the time being. The remedy was merely palliative; the permanent character of the difficulty was confessed and the fact that it was only a postponement to men of a future generation ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... true, the Oxford Dons are often charged with injustice and partiality, and too often the evidence is not sufficiently strong to excuse their judgments; but in this the evidence was not denied; only a palliative was put in, which every one can see through. The only injustice we can discover in this case is, that the head of Hart Hall, as Hertford College was called, seemed to have been influenced in pronouncing his sentence of expulsion by certain previous suspicions, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... infidelity to their engagements. Cure the two first, and the last would disappear, because it is a consequence of them, and not proceeding from a want of morals. I know of no remedy against indolence and extravagance, but a free course of justice. Everything else is merely palliative; but unhappily, the evil has gained too generally the mass of the nation, to leave the course of justice unobstructed. The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it, would make of our country one of the happiest ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... girl now that he was gone? Would she go completely to the bad—till she became one of those poor creatures like the figure in "The Shadow," who stood beneath lampposts in the streets? Out of this speculation, which was bitter as the taste of aloes, there came to her a craving for some palliative, some sweetness, some expression of that instinct of fellow-feeling deep in each human breast, however disharmonic. But even with that craving was mingled the itch to justify herself, and prove that she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... a plunging gallop, the bridle broke, and I came down behind on the crown of my head. He gave me a kick in the thigh at the same time. I felt none the worse for this rough treatment, but would not recommend it to others as a palliative in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... juste milieu [Fr.], golden mean, ariston metron [Gr.]. moderator; lullaby, sedative, lenitive, demulcent, antispasmodic, carminative, laudanum; rose water, balm, poppy, opiate, anodyne, milk, opium, poppy or mandragora; wet blanket; palliative. V. be moderate &c adj.; keep within bounds, keep within compass; sober down, settle down; keep the peace, remit, relent, take in sail. moderate, soften, mitigate, temper, accoy^; attemper^, contemper^; mollify, lenify^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... about ten days after an operation had been performed on him for the relief of the dropsical accumulations incidental to his liver trouble. Four such operations had been found necessary during this illness. They were at best only palliative. His joy on receiving the letter and money from London was such that the wound, not yet healed, opened, and a great discharge followed. A letter of thanks was sent to the Society, dictated by the master, but he was too weak even to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer

... ask ourselves, if the suffrage with its programme of feminism is barred as leading to social disaster, any palliative or corrective that can be applied to ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... assure an artist the means of living. So then he must submit to such humiliation: an intimate and sorrowful art, music in which is told the secret of the artist's inmost life, offered up as an amusement—or rather as a palliative of boredom, or as another sort of boredom—in the theaters or in fashionable drawing-rooms, to an audience of snobs and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... undeniably the pernicious consequences of reckless propagation; but he who forces a great evil upon public attention is expected to find the practical remedy; and Malthus had little to prescribe beyond a few palliative measures and the expediency of self-restraint, while his proposal to abolish the poor laws in the interest of pauperism was interpreted as a recommendation that poor folk should be starved into prudential and self-reliant habits. Malthus held, indeed, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... widower, unkempt of hair, in bed, with head covered, sighing: an infirm dog, Athos: aconite, resorted to by increasing doses of grains and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia: the face in death of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... Operation for.—Complete prolapsus in which the whole gut is involved, as seen in the very young and the very aged, is suited for palliative rather than radical treatment. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... work and endeavour brought with it no reward of praise or popularity. It suffered the fate of all unsectarianism, and made him to be as one man in the midst of foes. He soon began to see that the utmost he could do was only palliative and temporary. So he turned to class organisation as something more hopeful than private charity. When the International Workingmen's Association was formed, he joined it as one of its first members; indeed, he mainly helped to establish it. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... productions, the Romanzero and the "Confessions." There can be no more explicit description of the poet's conversion than is contained in these "confessions." During his sickness he sought a palliative for his pains—in the Bible. With a melancholy smile his mind reverted to the memories of his youth, to the heroism which is the underlying principle of Judaism. The Psalmist's consolations, the elevating principles laid down in the Pentateuch, exerted a powerful ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... that South African politicians as a whole were indifferent to the suffering of the luckless victims of the Land Act, but they eased their consciences with the palliative thought that the sufferers were not so many. However this blissful though erroneous self-satisfaction was nailed to the counter by the Rev. A. Burnet of Transvaal, when he said: "I have yet to learn that a harsh law becomes less ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... much struck with the head of the family, an elderly man with blue eyes, fine features, and a thoughtful expression. He spoke sadly of the effect of American competition, and admitted that protection could offer but a mere palliative. Hitherto I had found a keenly protectionist bias among French agriculturists. Of England and the English he spoke with much sympathy, although at this time we were as yet far from the Entente Cordiale. "C'est le plus grand peuple au monde" ("It is the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... explanation of human destiny: on the contrary, they hint that probably we could not understand such an explanation if it were given us; at any rate, they allow that it is not given us. Their course is palliative: they suggest an "analogy of difficulties"; if our minds were greater, so they reason, we should comprehend these doctrines,—now we cannot explain analogous facts which we see and know. No style can be more opposite to the bold argument, the boastful exposition of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... degraded one. Throughout the 18th century—and the great Whig families were at least as much to blame for this as the Tories—by enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of the franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry underwent a steady process of degradation into serfdom: into a serfdom which, during the first twenty years of the next century, hung constantly and precariously on the edge of actual starvation. The whole theory ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... still. I want to provide for a person—very dear to me—whom I shall never see again. My own little patrimony is hardly sufficient to make her independent of the world. The hope, if I could only live long enough, of increasing it to a certain sum, has impelled me to resist the disease by such palliative means as I could devise. The one effectual palliative in my case, is—opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the virtues of opium have their limit. The progress ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... made the embarrassments of the theory of knowledge sufficiently clear for Kant, his most important successor, to hit upon the most obvious palliative, and in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant set himself to patch up Hume's analysis. Experience as it came through the channels of sense, he admitted Hume had analysed correctly; it was 'a manifold,' a whirl of separate sensations. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... As a palliative to her conscience, Elma suggested a farther village as the termination to the drive, directing the course with a thrill of guilty triumph ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... plenty of preventives," returned the doctor. "That's what we want. Smoking and inhaling all sorts of rubbish is merely a palliative that does more harm than good in the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung

... always that—work, the great palliative, a narcotic dulling the pain which, without it, would be almost beyond ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... lay the seeds of trouble for the Irish leader. Liberals have never understood that Ireland will not take from them what it would take from the Tories. It will accept, as a palliative, from the party opposed to Home Rule what it will not accept from those who have admitted the justice ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... As a palliative to the statement of John Lander, and as some relief to the dark picture which we have just exhibited, it must be confessed, that when the circumstances are taken into consideration, which have already been detailed, when Lander first visited the Eboe ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... good, of a newly landed German. The judge followed close with the story of a very green Irishman; and the general, with mellow inconsequence, brought in a tale to the credit of the departed Jackson and debit of the still surviving Clay. A new sultriness prevailed. The judge's palliative word, that many a story hard on Clay was older than Clay himself, relieved the tension scarcely more than did Lucian's inquiry whether it was not, at any rate, true beyond cavil that Clay had treated Jackson perfidiously in ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... purely infectious, and is never found in regions where it has not gained a foothold by importation. Palliative measures have in every instance failed to eradicate the disease, and are only justifiable, as in Australia, after the plague has reached dimensions utterly beyond the reach of any ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... that all this was only temporary and palliative, and that more radical measures must be taken to secure Sybil's happiness. On this subject she thought in secret until both head and heart ached. One thing and one thing only was clear: if Sybil ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... people. Their sympathy being thoroughly aroused, they resolved to make up for lost time; and after this ladies rode in town every day, arranging among themselves for different days, and bringing for the convalescents the fresh vegetables which were so valuable as a palliative, and preventive of scurvy; for the sick, chickens, eggs, fresh butter, buttermilk, and sweet milk. Country wagons also brought in small supplies for sale, but never in proportion to the demand. Many of the ladies, after one visit to a ward or two, were utterly overcome by ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... over you that made him get off wrong to-day," he ventured at last, as a sort of palliative. "They say he was going to start home right in the face of the fire, and when they wouldn't let him, he headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him. He thought sure you—he thought ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... management of such prosecutions, in taking compensation therefor, or in any other charge, are wholly without foundation truth, and for their publication there were, in the judgment of the House, no facts connected with said prosecutions furnishing either a palliative or an excuse. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell

... Surprising, said he, how wide that old rascal was in the chest. He transferred his money to Hun Shanklin's pockets, chuckling at the thought that he was returning it whence it came. In conscience, said he, if conscience required such a palliative, he had made restitution. ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... commercial success went on swelling, and though the capitalists would if they had dared have engrossed the whole of the advantages thereby gained at the expense of their wage slaves, the Chartist revolt warned them that it was not safe to attempt it. They were FORCED to try to allay discontent by palliative measures. They had to allow Factory Acts to be passed regulating the hours and conditions of labour of women and children, and consequently of men also in some of the more important and consolidated industries; they were FORCED to repeal the ferocious ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... of exclusion had not now the same palliative of righteous resentment. With Yvonne Rupert, the splendid-flaming, vicious ingrate, he had felt himself the sinned against. But before this wife-widow, this dutiful, hard-working, tragic creature, he had nothing but self-contempt. He tottered ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... advantage, he accepted the bribe which the smugglers offered in their terror, and connived at, or rather encouraged, their intention of carrying away the child of his benefactor, who, if left behind, was old enough to have described the scene of blood which he had witnessed. The only palliative which the ingenuity of Glossin could offer to his conscience was, that the temptation was great, and came suddenly upon him, embracing as it were the very advantages on which his mind had so long rested, and promising to relieve him from distresses which must have otherwise ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... merely of a palliative character, knowing the patient to be rapidly sinking. In this exhausted state he remained for some months; his appetite was almost entirely gone; the oedema of limbs increasing. There was also a leaden hue over the surface of the body, which was constantly ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... alone In truth, if this circular was intended to conciliate the inhabitants of British America, it was a total failure. The universal mind was too much irritated to be soothed by such an impotent palliative. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... from Canada and Mexico save natives of the two countries themselves. As much as possible should be done to distribute the immigrants upon the land and keep them away from the contested tenement-house districts of the great cities. But distribution is a palliative, not a cure. The prime need is to keep out all immigrants who will not make good American citizens. The laws now existing for the exclusion of undesirable immigrants should be strengthened. Adequate means should be adopted, enforced by sufficient penalties, to compel steamship companies engaged ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... hypertrophied playfulness. He has the right to learn that his own mother in his own home, with the aid of his own family physician, can remove his physical defects so that it will be unnecessary for outsiders to give him a palliative free lunch at school, thus neglecting the cause of his defects ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... <gr/ariston metron/gr>[Grk]. moderator; lullaby, sedative, lenitive, demulcent, antispasmodic, carminative, laudanum; rose water, balm, poppy, opiate, anodyne, milk, opium, "poppy or mandragora"; wet blanket; palliative. V. be -moderate &c. adj.; keep within bounds, keep within compass; sober down, settle down; keep the peace, remit, relent, take in sail. moderate, soften, mitigate, temper, accoy|; attemper[obs3], contemper[obs3]; mollify, lenify[obs3], dulcify[obs3], dull, take off the edge, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus



Words linked to "Palliative" :   alleviant, moderating, palliate, therapeutic, remedy, mitigative, cure, curative



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