(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.
Penitence
Definition:
(n.) The quality or condition of being penitent; the disposition of a penitent; sorrow for sins or faults; repentance; contrition.
Example Sentences:
(1) 9, 333] corresponds to the induction of sequential cellular events, such as cell exit and remigration, by other antimitotic agents [C. Penit and F. Vasseur (1988) J. Immunol.
(2) All the same, you might have expected the "balanced scorecard" approach to directors' bonuses at HSBC to be suspended for a year to underline corporate penitence.
(3) Bill Clinton delivered a penitent personal confession, backed up by a political blitzkrieg, in an effort to save his presidency yesterday, just before the US Congress released independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report, giving details in support of 11 charges which could drive the president from the White House.
(4) Nichols, too, recalls that this Easter – just a fortnight after Pope Francis was elected – Westminster Cathedral found itself awash with penitents.
(5) Australian election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull says Coalition can form majority despite dramatic losses Read more Turnbull is now in a position where he has to bow penitently before the voting public, acknowledging voter disillusionment, vowing to work harder, acknowledging the extent of the campaign miscalculations.
(6) This is the monster that Spare Rib faces, even as it wields a penitent Galloway – dressed, ideally, as a naughty kitten.
(7) This he could do only in a series of acts of memory, public penitence and contrition, in one of which I was peripherally involved.
(8) Ofcom is in a penitent mood over the unsuccessful pairing of Johnson with Andy Duncan , so Burns has joined immediately as chairman-designate.
(9) The Romantics’ cult of the ruin was reborn as a cult of penitence.
(10) Arena is not penitent, however, as he is expected to be.
(11) Meanwhile, an apparently penitent Mr Clinton made his most emotional appeal so far for the mercy and forgiveness of the American people, upbraiding himself as a sinner and issuing fresh apologies for his record of sex and lies with Ms Lewinsky.
(12) There was no penitence in his negotiating stance but it gave Mandela what he needed.
(13) One carving, of Mary sheltering a crowd of tiny penitents under her cloak, created a scandal in the 1850s when it was taken from its original place, over the door of an oratorio in Venice (which survives, the stone still showing the scars from the removal of the sculpture) and sold to the V&A soon after the museum opened, in 1852.
(14) The priest who hears a confession can always advise the penitent to inform the law enforcement even if the instruction is ignored, whereas Siri does not offer moral guidance at all and it seems that Apple is working on a system that it could not decrypt even if it wanted to.
(15) Now it is being relaunched under the journalist Charlotte Raven, who promises a "penitent" George Galloway at the launch party, in some kind of yet to be revealed menial role, which is excellent, but not enough.
(16) On the basis of these results and of a previous work on the ionic basis of the inward rectification of Purkinje cells (Crepel & Penit-Soria, 1986), it appears that these neurones exhibit a well developed alpha (possibly alpha 1)-adrenergic inhibition of a low-threshold Ca conductance and a Ca-dependent K conductance operating near resting potential.
(17) Perhaps, though, this response was because he felt he was untouchable, for his penitent tour of Liverpool earned him more admirers.
(18) Backers will be treated to a glamorous Shoreditch party where "costumed penitents", including the columnist Rod Liddle and MP George Galloway , will serve cocktails, Raven adds.
(19) If Blair wants material for his vanity project – “why are people so disillusioned with establishment politics?” – then how about starting with politicians who face no penalties for their colossal misdeeds, and continue to exert huge power and influence without any apparent shame or even penitence?
(20) Those awful days when James and Rupert had to appear penitent, shaking their heads over the failure of minions who inexplicably withheld crucial information from them, must feel like a bad dream.