What is "propensities"

Usage examples of "propensities".

Happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper, the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example.

We know that the bad propensities of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence.

When a king is governed by a woman merely through his amatory propensities, good government is not probable, though even then there are exceptions.

All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women.

If no authority, not in its nature temporary, were allowed to one human being over another, society would not be employed in building up propensities with one hand which it has to curb with the other.

And though it may stimulate the amatory propensities of men, it does not conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences of education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes.

If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote?

Out of all these contending propensities and child-rearing practices, some people emerge with an intact ability to fantasize, and a history, extending well into adulthood, of confabulation.

Among UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such experiences.

Maybe people with hereditary propensities for cancer also have hereditary propensities to take addictive drugs - so cancer and smoking might be correlated, but the cancer would not be caused by the smoking.

If men and women turn out to have different hereditary propensities, won't this be used as an excuse for the former to suppress the latter?

Now, take any race of animals, confine them in idleness and inaction, whether in a stye, a stable, or a state room, pamper them with high diet, gratify all their sexual appetites, immerse them in sensualities, nourish their passions, let every thing bend before them, and banish whatever might lead them to think, and in a few generations they become all body and no mind: and this, too, by a law of nature, by that very law by which we are in the constant practice of changing the characters and propensities of the animals we raise for our own purposes.

Take from man his selfish propensities, and he can have nothing to seduce him from the practice of virtue.

Or subdue those propensities by education, instruction or restraint, and virtue remains without a competitor.

Inattention to this is what has called for this explanation, which reflection would have rendered unnecessary with the candid, while nothing will do it with those who use the former opinion only as a stalking horse, to cover their disloyal propensities to keep us in eternal vassalage to a foreign and unfriendly people.