(n.) A picking of heart; poignant grief proceeding from a sense of guilt or consciousness of causing pain; the sting of conscience.
Example Sentences:
(1) This is especially the case when it is confronted with regimes such as those of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin that feel no compunction over a scorched-earth response to insurgency and do so with calculation.
(2) So ends in tragedy our three-year struggle.” Didn’t she have compunctions about publishing this intimate material?
(3) Isis, which has a growing operation in Afghanistan and little compunction about slaughtering civilians, are obvious suspects.
(4) Adult fighters who have shown no compunction abducting children from playgrounds, and throwing them into the frontline, will not shy from inviting such attacks.
(5) By all accounts he is a ruthless killer who has shown little compunction when it came to the on-screen murders.
(6) If they want to achieve global dominance in any particular industry, they take direct aim at foreign competitors and have little compunction about systematically weakening them.
(7) Wes Brown's past may be bound up with Manchester United but the Sunderland centre-back had no compunction about playing a key role in denying his former club a place in the League Cup final .
(8) He said it could “hardly be Islamic to kill without compunction Shia, Yazidi, Turkmen, Kurds, Christians and Sunni who don’t share this death cult’s view of the world” and nothing could “justify the beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions, ethnic cleansing, rape and sexual slavery”.
(9) In times past, great educators have spoken without compunction about the virtues of discrimination – not the loaded modern use of the word bespeaking one-upmanship and prejudice, but discrimination as a discipline of the intellect and character.
(10) I did have compunctions until various publications and articles appeared that have got the story so wrong that I felt that before I pop my clogs I had better get the story straight.” Gabrielle was distressed, for instance, that she was quoted in one report saying her brother died a virgin.
(11) The sale of a poison is regarded as a mere act of commercial intercourse; tant pis for the unfortunate victim of error or passion; he has the benefit of a coroner's inquest; the vendor of the poison receives a reprimand, and things resume their natural course--that is, arsenic and oxalic acid are retailed without compunction, and men are hurried from time to time into eternity.
(12) As food banks proliferate, policymakers' compunction to address the root causes of poverty and hardship diminish.
(13) But the rabid anti-smoking lobby has never been satisfied with merely protecting the health of non-smokers, and appears to have lost any compunction to defend further curtailments of smoking with legitimate medical research.
(14) Dimon – and JP Morgan – have shown a lot of compunction.
(15) You have no compunction in immediately excluding coal, the product of a rival industry, from this endeavour.
(16) The regrettable reality is that to mount the kind of attacks which Isil in Syria and in Iraq has in mind for Australia, all you need is a determined individual who will kill without compunction, a knife, an iPhone, and a victim,” Abbott told the Seven Network as part of a Friday morning media blitz.
(17) Refreshingly, Steve McClaren’s successor had no compunction about leaving the best part of £45m on his bench either in the shape of Wijnaldum, Jonjo Shelvey, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Henri Saivet.
(18) I am not here to do a character work-up on someone who lost his life less than 24 hours ago.” Koval asked protesters to remain calm and said the police department would continue to protect their right to assembly, “whatever [protesters’] compunction might be.” Demonstrations that began on Saturday afternoon continued on the streets of Madison as the news conference took place.
(19) A lot of Israelis said, ‘If you’re telling us we need to choose between them and us, then we choose us, without any compunction.’” Everyone I spoke to about B’Tselem acknowledged that the second intifada had made the group’s fundamental message – that Israelis ought to care about the human rights of individual Palestinians and recognise the military occupation’s abuses as the primary human-rights violations in the region – much, much harder for Israelis to accept.
(20) But he added that if the UK suspended arms sales, “be in no doubt that we would be vacating a space that would rapidly be filled by other western countries who would happily supply arms with nothing like the same compunctions or criteria or respect for humanitarian law.
Fleeting
Definition:
(p. pr. & vb. n.) of Fleet
(a.) Passing swiftly away; not durable; transient; transitory; as, the fleeting hours or moments.
Example Sentences:
(1) He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction," Chinen wrote.
(2) Fleeting though it may have been (he jetted off to New York this morning and is due in Toronto on Saturday), there was a poignant reason for his appearance: he was here to play a tribute set to Frankie Knuckles, the Godfather of house and one of Morales's closest friends, who died suddenly in March.
(3) If battery and EV prices fall more rapidly over the period, and the price of oil increases more rapidly, replacing the fleet with EVs could be cost-neutral.
(4) As aircraft capable of sustaining high "G" maneuvers enter the U.S. Navy Fleet, the reported incidence of cervical injury to aircrew seems to have increased.
(5) A popular strain of foreign policy thought has long held that the US should be guided primarily by self-interest rather than human rights concerns: hence, since the US wants its Fifth Fleet to remain in Bahrain and believes ( with good reason ) that these dictators will serve US interests far better than if popular will in these countries prevails, it is right to prop up these autocrats.
(6) Her unclothed remains were found six months later by mushroom pickers at Yateley Heath Woods, near Fleet, Hampshire, 25 miles away.
(7) A warship from Russia’s Pacific fleet also accompanied former Russian president Medvedev’s visit to San Francisco in 2010.” Officials from the Russian embassy in Canberra declined to confirm the details when contacted by Guardian Australia on Wednesday.
(8) One of the Conservative party's most influential voices on defence has conceded that Britain can no longer be regarded as a "division-one military power", and raised questions over the sense of replacing the Trident nuclear fleet with a new generation of missile-launching submarines.
(9) But although under the ayatollahs there have been fleeting moments of optimism, there have also been long periods of repression.
(10) And it is certainly before you factor in the service's upgrade (worth around £9bn, and paid for by the public), and the fleet of Pendolino trains (again, largely subsidised by the government).
(11) I couldn’t even imagine it because I have done it so many times.” The incident received only fleeting national coverage, occurring less than a month before the presidential election.
(12) "We have rhetorical pressure, which we are using, and we have the Seventh Fleet, which nobody wants to use, and in between our options are more constrained," he said.
(13) When he talks about his work and his motivation, he exudes an intensity, as if his time with you is also fleeting.
(14) Many of Long’s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation , a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble.
(15) He seemed to have his finger on an invisible button, hardwired into the brains of the Fleet Street editors, driving them into an apoplectic frenzy of rage each time he chose to push it.
(16) But the task remains to move the country's remaining fossil fuel-dependent sectors to clean technology: Iceland's fishing fleet, cars and buses, which run on oil and petrol, ironically make the country one of the highest per head greenhouse gas emitters in Europe .
(17) 1,4-Dideoxy-1,4-imino-D-mannitol (DIM) was synthesized chemically from benzyl-alpha-D-mannopyranoside [Fleet et al (1984) J. Chem.
(18) The agency hopes it can later extend the work to urban rivers outside London, but is pessimistic that parts of the Fleet might one day be released to public view.
(19) The Institute of Cetacean Research, a quasi-governmental body that oversees the hunts, had hoped to use sales from the meat to cover the costs of the whaling fleet's expeditions, she said.
(20) "The council's fleet of company cars have upper limits on the CO2 they produce," says Thorp.