Noun: baron
Pronunciation:(ber-un [N. Amer], ba-run [Brit])
Baron meaning:
- A nobleman (in various countries) of varying rank
- A British peer of the lowest rank
- A very wealthy or powerful businessman
Synonyms: big businessman, business leader, king, magnate, mogul, power, top executive, tycoon
Quotations:
- C.S. Lewis – Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- C.S. Lewis – Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
- Megan Whalen Turner – I was listening,” the king said, aggrieved. “I closed my eyes to listen better.””What did you hear?””I’m not sure,” he said.” That’s why I was listening so closely. I may have to ask the baron to repeat some parts of his report on his grain tax.””I am sure you can arrange an appointment.””I am sure I can too.
- Brian McClellan – You’ve one mark on your record,” Tamas said. “You once punched a na-baron in the face. Broke his jaw. Tell me about that.”Olem grimaced. “Officially, sir, I was pushing him out of the way of a runaway carriage. Saved his life. Half my company saw it.”“With your fist?”“Aye.”“And unofficially?”“The man was a git. He shot my dog because it startled his horse.”“And if I ever have cause to shoot your dog?”“I’ll punch you in the face.”“Fair enough. You have the job.
- Sarah MacLean – Ralston didn’t care. He turned on his brother as the surgeon knelt next to him and inspected the wound. “She could have been killed!” And what about you?” This time, it was Callie who spoke, her own pent-up energy releasing in anger, and the men turned as one to look at her, surprised that she and found her voice. “What about you and your idiotic plans to somehow restore my honor by playing guns out in the middle of nowhere with OXFORD?” She said the baron’s name in disdain. “Like children? Of all the ridiculous, unnecessary, thoughtless, male things to do who even fights duels anymore?!
- David Eddings – I note this hound of thine, Sir Knight,” he said to Garion to ease them past an embarrassing moment, “a bitch, I perceive–“”Steady,” Garion said firmly to the she-wolf. “That is a very offensive term,” she growled.”He didn’t invent it. It’s not his fault.” “Canst thou perhaps, Sir Knight, identify her breed?””She is a wolf, my Lord,” Garion told him.”A wolf!” the baron exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “We must flee ere the fearsome beast fall upon us and devour us.”It was a bit ostentatious, but sometimes thing like that impress people. Garion reached down and scratched the wolf’s ears.”Ones advises that you stop that,” the wolf told him, “unless you have a paw to spare.””You wouldn’t!” he exclaimed, snatching his hand back.”But you’re not entirely sure, are you?” She bared her teeth almost in a grin.
- Julie Garwood – An English baron wed to my daughter? I’ll die first, I will.” Johanna quit rubbing Claire’s shoulder and stepped forward.”A very rich baron,” she blurted out. The laird frowned at Johanna with what she thought was indignation. “Wealth is not an issue here,” he muttered. “How rich?” They were married an hour later.
- Victor Pelevin – I want to find my golden joy,” I said.The baron laughed loudly. “Splendid,” he said. “But what does that mean to you–your golden joy?””The golden joy,” I replied, “is when a peculiar flight of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life. Am I making myself clear?
- John Green – Hassan said, “I’m a Kuwaiti exchange student; my dad’s an oil baron.”Colin shook his head, “Too obvious. I’m a Spaniard. A refugee. My parents were murdered by Basque separatists.””I don’t know if Basque is a thing or a person and neither will they, so no. Okay, I just got to America from Honduras. My name is Miguel. My parents made a fortune in bananas, and you are my bodyguard, because the banana workers’ union wants me dead.”Colin shot back, “That’s good, but you don’t speak Spanish. Okay, I was abducted by Eskimos in the Yukon Terr-no, that’s crap. We’re cousins from France visiting the United States for the first time. It’s out high school graduation trip.””That’s boring, but we’re out of time. I’m the English speaker?” asked Hassan. “Yeah, fine.””Okay, they’re coming,” said Hassan. “What’s your name?””Pierre.””Okay.
- The Invisible Committee – The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation—becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure—as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.
Sample sentences:
- Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.
- I inherited this country when I was only a child, Nahuseresh. I have held it. I have fought down rebellious barons. I’ve fought Sounis to keep the land on this side of the mountains. I have killed men and watched them hang. I’ve seen them tortured to keep this country safe and mine. How did you think I did this if I was a fool with cow eyes for any handsome man with gold in his purse?
- You have to believe him, because he’s going to have your entire palace up in arms and your court in chaos and every member of it from the barons to the boot cleaners coming to you for his blood, and you are going to have to deal with it.”Attolia smiled. “You make him sound like more trouble than he is worth.”No,” said Eddis thoughtfully. “Never more than he is worth.
- All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunegonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. – That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.
- Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Black water investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
- Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Every man’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.
- • Reality is a curious thing. Truth is not as solid and universal as any of us would like it to be; selfishness guides perception, and perception invites justification. The physical image in the mirror, if not pleasing, can be altered by the mere brush of fingers through hair.And so it is true that we can manipulate our own reality. We can persuade, even deceive. We can make others view us in dishonest ways. We can hide selfishness with charity, make a craving for acceptance into magnanimity, and amplify our smile to coerce a hesitant lover. The world is illusion, and often delusion, as victors write the histories and the children who die quietly under the stamp of a triumphant army never really existed. The robber baron becomes philanthropist in the final analysis, by bequeathing only that for which he had no more use. The king who sends young men and women to die becomes beneficent with the kiss of a baby. Every problem becomes a problem of perception to those who understand that reality, in reality, is what you make reality to be.This is the way of the world, but it is not the only way.
- It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.
- Kaldar almost never stops and thinks about the consequences of his actions. Something is fun or not fun, and my brother’s fun often lands him in interesting places such as jails or castles belonging to California robber barons. Where other people see certain death, my brother sees an opportunity for a hilarious, thrilling adventure. But when I got the tattoo, Kaldar warned me that marrying her was a bad idea.
- The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”-he might become one one day!
- Già, siete barone per i domestici, signore per i giornalisti, cittadino per i vostri elettori. Sono sfumature che si addicono assai a un governo costituzionale. Capisco perfettamente.
- The plain of Bedegraine was a forest of pavilions. They looked like old-fashioned bathing tents, and were every colour of the rainbow. There were heraldic devices worked or stamped on the sides . Then there were pennons floating from the tops of the tents, and sheaves of spears leaning against them. The more sporting barons had shields or huge copper basins outside their front doors, and all you had to do was to give a thump on one of these with the butt-end of your spear, for the baron to come out like an angry bee and have a fight with you, almost before the resounding boom had died away. Sir Dinadain, who was a cheerful man, had hung a chamber-pot outside his.
- What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs—economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.
- When princes flee battle, and knights turn free-lance, and barons rob pilgrims, what value has honor?”“Why, all the more, seeing how rare it has become.
- Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.
- Baron, BaronessOriginally, the term baron signified a person who owned land as a direct gift from the monarchy or as a descendant of a baron. Now it is an honorary title. The wife of a baron is a baroness.Duke, Duchess, Duchy, DukedomOriginally, a man could become a duke in one of two ways. He could be recognized for owning a lot of land. Or he could be a victorious military commander. Now a man can become a duke simply by being appointed by a monarch. Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and her son Charles the Duke of Wales. A duchess is the wife or widow of a duke. The territory ruled by a duke is a duchy or a dukedom.Earl, EarldomEarl is the oldest title in the English nobility. It originally signified a chieftan or leader of a tribe. Each earl is identified with a certain area called an earldom. Today the monarchy sometimes confers an earldom on a retiring prime minister. For example, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is the Earl of Stockton.KingA king is a ruling monarch. He inherits this position and retains it until he abdicates or dies. Formerly, a king was an absolute ruler. Today the role of King of England is largely symbolic. The wife of a king is a queen.KnightOriginally a knight was a man who performed devoted military service. The title is not hereditary. A king or queen may award a citizen with knighthood. The criterion for the award is devoted service to the country.LadyOne may use Lady to refer to the wife of a knight, baron, count, or viscount. It may also be used for the daughter of a duke, marquis, or earl. Marquis, also spelled Marquess. A marquis ranks above an earl and below a duke. Originally marquis signified military men who stood guard on the border of a territory. Now it is a hereditary title.LordLord is a general term denoting nobility. It may be used to address any peer (see below) except a duke. The House of Lords is the upper house of the British Parliament. It is a nonelective body with limited powers. The presiding officer for the House of Lords is the Lord Chancellor or Lord High Chancellor. Sometimes a mayor is called lord, such as the Lord Mayor of London. The term lord may also be used informally to show respect.Peer, PeerageA peer is a titled member of the British nobility who may sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. Peers are ranked in order of their importance. A duke is most important; the others follow in this order: marquis, earl, viscount, baron. A group of peers is called a peerage. Prince, PrincessPrinces and princesses are sons and daughters of a reigning king and queen. The first-born son of a royal family is first in line for the throne, the second born son is second in line. A princess may become a queen if there is no prince at the time of abdication or death of a king. The wife of a prince is also called a princess.QueenA queen may be the ruler of a monarchy, the wife—or widow—of a king.Viscount, ViscountessThe title Viscount originally meant deputy to a count. It has been used most recently to honor British soldiers in World War II. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery was named a viscount. The title may also be hereditary. The wife of a viscount is a viscountess. (In pronunciation the initial s is silent.)House of WindsorThe British royal family has been called the House of Windsor since 1917. Before then, the royal family name was Wettin, a German name derived from Queen Victoria’s husband. In 1917, England was at war with Germany. King George V announced that the royal family name would become the House of Windsor, a name derived from Windsor Castle, a royal residence. The House of Windsor has included Kings George V, Edward VII, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II.
- You are learning that what you require and what your frame may endure can be two very different things. If only I could have a solon for every patient who came to me speaking as you do! ‘Ibelius, I have smoked Jeremite powders for twenty years and now my throat bleeds, make me well!’ ‘Ibelius, I have been drunk and brawling all night, and now my eye has been cut out! Restore my vision, damn you.’ Why, let us not speak of solons, let us instead say a copper baron per such outburst. I could still retire to Lashain a gentleman!
- It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.
- The night of the fireworks changed the course of many lives in England, though no one suspected the dark future as hundreds of courtiers stared, faces upturned in delight, at the starbursts of crimson, green, and gold that lit up the terraces, gardens, and pleasure grounds of Rosethorn House, the country home of Richard, Baron Thornleigh. That night, no one was more proud to belong to the baron’s family than his eighteen-year-old ward, Justine Thornleigh; she had no idea that she would soon cause a deadly division in the family and ignite a struggle between two queens. Yet she was already, innocently, on a divergent path, for as Lord and Lady Thornleigh and their multitude of guests watched the dazzle of fireworks honoring the spring visit of Queen Elizabeth, Justine was hurrying away from the public gaiety. Someone had asked to meet her in private.
- Critics were not fans of the latest from Sacha Baron Cohen.
- The furniture baron owns one suit, which he rarely wears.
- Nothing but good can come from a Baron Davis comeback.
- Don’t try to make yourself a land baron at the turn of the river.
- It features such intriguing chapters as ‘What persons women may not marry’, ‘The Baron may beat his Wife’ and ‘Of Wooing’.
- Just call him the Baron of Booze, the Amadeus of Alcohol, the Head Honcho of Hooch.
- Dress up a rod, it looks like a baron. Dress up a stick of heather, it looks like a lady.
- Dress up a country bumpkin and he looks like a baron.
- Better a poor husband than a lover who’s a baron.
- The noble lady drove by towards the baron’s mansion with her three daughters, in a gilded carriage drawn by six horses.
- My father is an oil baron.