A neutral or uncommitted person (especially in politics)

Usage examples of independent.

As his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that.

For Adams, ever the independent man, it was a role of the kind he most loved--setting forth on his own against the odds in the service of the greatest of causes.

Yet with Adams he remained on speaking terms--in part because he knew Adams to be too independent ever to be in league with Hamilton, and because he sincerely wished for no further rupture in their friendship.

For Adams, who had so long championed a strong, independent judiciary as proper balance to the other two branches, it was a major improvement and he proceeded at once to fill the new positions.

In mid-1991, Bin Ladin dispatched a band of supporters to the northern Afghanistan border to assist the Tajikistan Islamists in the ethnic conflicts that had been boiling there even before the Central Asian departments of the Soviet Union became independent states.

And I might go on to show in some detail that a doctoral investigation in the humanities, when the subject is well chosen, serves the same purpose in the education of a student of language and literature as the independent, intensive study of a living or a fossil animal, when prescribed by Agassiz to a beginner in natural science.

Additional intelligence units and elements of the 47th Independent Armored Brigade, commanded by Alawite Colonel Nadim Abbas, with its T-62 tanks, were also stationed in and around the town.

Indeed, the English king, George III, in 1763 forbade colonization--as Louis XIV at one time had wished to prevent it--beyond the Alleghany Mountains without his special permission, and, moreover, it was hardly more than ten years after the titular transfer to England that the colonists declared themselves independent.

With few exceptions, it lays no restrictions on the type or length of keys, as does the Kasiski method, nor on the alphabets, which may be interrelated or entirely independent.

Whereas the Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also--what the others had lacked--the will and the power to resist tyranny by force.

The characters of the sporogonium have as their object the nutrition and effective distribution of the spores, and only exceptionally, as in the Anthocerotaceae, are concerned with independent assimilation.

The ordinance also calls for independent audits, and allows taxpayers to sue if the park funds are misused or ripped off.

Though called to the bar, both Auguste and Hippolyte Ballet were now men of independent means.

Already they have been compelled by that mysterious power to suppress the slave-making wars which were formerly waged every year from Kordofan and Sennaar, and which are still being waged from the independent kingdoms of Darfur, Waday, Bagirmi, and Bornu.

He believed that the proved oil-bearing country that runs down from Iraq through Kuwait, Dahran, Bahrain and Qattar would be found to continue, swinging south-east along the line of the Jebel mountains, through Buraimi and into the independent sheikhdom of Saraifa.