(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.
Scruple
Definition:
(n.) A weight of twenty grains; the third part of a dram.
(n.) Hence, a very small quantity; a particle.
(n.) Hesitation as to action from the difficulty of determining what is right or expedient; unwillingness, doubt, or hesitation proceeding from motives of conscience.
(v. i.) To be reluctant or to hesitate, as regards an action, on account of considerations of conscience or expedience.
(v. t.) To regard with suspicion; to hesitate at; to question.
(v. t.) To excite scruples in; to cause to scruple.
Example Sentences:
(1) Their mutual enmity toward the West would in the end triumph over any scruples of that nature, as we see graphically in Iraq today.
(2) "Since then there has been silence, as if, under the pressure of contemporary change, there was no more moral scruple and concern, no new substance to be spun.
(3) I am not going to tread on private (and public) grief in the case of Miliband, other than to say that, when saddled with a leader they regard as a loser, the Tories traditionally have no scruples in unseating the incumbent.
(4) A sensationalist and scruple-free press seems eager to collude in their “noble lie”: that a Middle Eastern militia, thriving on the utter ineptitude of its local adversaries, poses an “existential risk” to an island fortress that saw off Napoleon and Hitler .
(5) "The company has acted without scruples and without any compassion for the victims."
(6) Scruple also makes it necessary to point out that the gap between the Lib Dems and Labour is within the margin of polling error, so the Labour third place may not be definite.
(7) "Without consideration, scruples or respect, our family misfortune is being put on display and marketed," Ulrich Busch told Stern magazine's website .
(8) In this article, two cases are presented that illustrate that the principles underlying medical practice and religious scruples are often the same.
(9) (4) The extension of the instruments of traffic legislation to immediate measures by the police--preliminary or "mini" suspension of a person's driving license by resort to preventive rights by the police?--meets with constitutional or legal scruples.
(10) To claim the crown, should he trust Melisandre, whose mysterious powers and zero scruples about parricide could make him king?
(11) Part of the Ministry of Defence, but employing arms company executives as well as civil servants, Deso quickly learned to chase export orders without too many scruples.
(12) Colleagues have no scruples in the tactics they employ to silence female colleagues – "The leadership cuts our microphones off," she says – or through intimidation.
(13) It required the party's home affairs person to set aside any personal scruple and throw political red meat to the angry hang-'em-and-flog-'em lions in the conference hall.
(14) If they sell businesses that cause harm, or close them down, they argue that all that will happen is that someone with fewer scruples may just step into the space.
(15) To promote the selling of arms in Remembrance week suggests a man with either no scruples or very poor judgment.
(16) I didn't have time to deal with someone else's heartache or their moral scruples vis-a-vis ditching an apparently iron-clad prior engagement.
(17) Society can’t afford too many scruples about the privacy of those who provoke such suspicions.
(18) The face has a vague familiarity; Howard recalls that this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, 10 years earlier, had produced two tolerably well known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern.
(19) But he also upset corporate social responsibility advocates by showing himself willing to throw former scruples and do deals with TNK investors just months after he had threatened to sue them.
(20) Although he had no scruples about violating the right to life, he was a fanatic about regulations.