Go against the wishes of

Usage examples of defy.

I am ill at describing buildings, but the beauty and majesty of the American capitol might defy an abler pen than mine to do it justice.

What odds the yard had been turned into an Aceldama, if the System had been defied?

Who are these angels, these Companions, to defy the will of Adonai and be worshipped as gods?

Amefel, the earls must either swear to a man neither aetheling nor Aswydd, or they must defy the Marhanen king, precipitating the very crisis Cefwyn had avoided when he deposed and exiled Orien Aswydd and appointed a viceroy over the province.

She answered with perfect calm that I had nothing to expect from her as she did not love me, and as for keeping the secret she defied me to disclose it.

For thirteen days Barnett and his government had flamboyantly 86AN AMERICAN INSURRECTION defied the force and majesty of federal law.

The deficiency is sometimes so subtle biochemically that it defies easy test.

Then she immediately slipped the sleeveless bliaut back on before he noticed that she was, in fact, defying him again in solving the problem of getting wet in her own way.

A few years earlier, professional baseball players had been granted free agency by a court of law, and, after about two seconds of foot-shuffling, baseball owners put prices on players that defied the old commonsensical notions of what a baseball player should be paid.

Turning as they heard his defy, the crooks saw The Shadow, wheeling in from the blackness outside the loading yard, into the glow of lights from along the truck platform.

How the justices who later dissented could have brought themselves to join this per curiam opinion defies understandingunless they, too, were playing a game, trying to prevent a result with which they disagreed by forestalling the possibility that the Court would have to overrule the state court.

I knew, a bottle of fingernail polish Gina had left on the dressing table went flying, and, defying all gravitational law, landed upside down in the suitcase she had placed on the floor at the end of the daybed, around seven or eight feet away.

Genetic modification is surely a dynamist agenda, for the many mingled effects of changed genes defy detailed prediction.

Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean gunboat.

She perched on the edge of the seat, defying all its ergonomic potential.