How to Use divine right in a Sentence
divine right
noun- He ruled by divine right.
- My boss seems to think he has a divine right to order people around.
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This isn’t the first gin to get the divine right seal of approval.
—Jonah Flicker, Robb Report, 21 Feb. 2023
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In centuries past, it was seen as granting the monarch the divine right to rule.
—David Luhnow, wsj.com, 5 May 2023
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She’s almost been raised with this divine right to run the world and make the choices of which way the world goes.
—Jackie Strause, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Apr. 2023
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But right now, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child seizes the stage by divine right.
—Abby Jones, Billboard, 23 Apr. 2018
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But a lot of good teams have failed to qualify for the World Cup in the past, and nobody has got a divine right.
—Jonathan Tannenwald, Philly.com, 6 Oct. 2017
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This reform should weaken the notion that agents have a divine right to 5% or more.
—Chris Bryant | Bloomberg, Washington Post, 11 Oct. 2019
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But the tapestry suggests, too, that William won by divine right.
—Washington Post, 18 Jan. 2018
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Charles was an ultra-royalist who believed in the divine right of kings.
—Brian T. Allen, National Review, 11 Mar. 2020
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Church and state are united in the person of the king or queen, some of whom have historically claimed to rule by divine right.
—Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 9 Nov. 2022
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In the Middle Ages, kings ruled by divine right and were supposed to be infallible rulers.
—Paul Glover, Forbes, 10 Dec. 2021
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Luckily, there's no mortal soul Meghan Markle can't charm — even those blessed by divine right.
—Kathryn Lindsay, refinery29.com, 14 June 2018
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Sorry, but there’s no divine right for North Carolina and Kentucky to win every year.
—Dan Wolken, USA TODAY, 25 Mar. 2023
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Considered the most sacred part of the coronation, the anointing asserts the sovereign’s divine right to rule.
—Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 May 2023
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His belief in the divine right of himself generated a civil war.
—Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 9 Sep. 2022
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Those who believe in the divine right of kings will see a youth with royal blood running through him that is older even than England itself, that can be traced all the way back to the regal Ashanti.
—Zadie Smith, The New Yorker, 2 July 2019
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The amorphous, intangible potency of being granted divine right to rule became just a divine right to … be the queen.
—Vulture, 8 Sep. 2022
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Since this portion of the coronation symbolizes the monarch's divine right to the throne, it's typically done away from the public—and, of course, the millions of viewers watching on live television at home.
—Kelsey Mulvey, House Beautiful, 7 May 2023
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In the old Confucian-tinged imperial system, the emperor stood above ordinary kings and chieftains as the Son of Heaven, who possessed a divine right to rule.
—Michael Schuman, The Atlantic, 13 Oct. 2022
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For Smith, markets exist not by divine right but because they have been shaped by human beings in ways that generate both private and public value.
—Jesse Norman, WSJ, 23 Aug. 2018
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The decline has led to United’s falling away from contention for the Premier League championship, a title that once had seemed a divine right to fans of one of the world’s most celebrated sporting franchises.
—New York Times, 21 Apr. 2022
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The reason for that, Field suggests, is that there’s something about the exalted nature of this music that leads the people who live everyday within its heady majesty to feel as if pleasure, in every realm, is their divine right.
—Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 1 Sep. 2022
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She is identified as both ritual priestess and triumphant ruler in a monument that enshrines her elite status and a belief in the divine right to rule that would shape her role and image in the late classic Mayan period.
—Mary Tompkins Lewis, WSJ, 25 Feb. 2022
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David has invented a wholly new iconography for a modern ruler, bereft of the old monarchical symbols, in which authority derives not from divine right but from valor.
—Jason Farago, New York Times, 12 Feb. 2020
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Mesopotamian kingship was conceived as being descended from heaven, an ancient precursor to what would become, a few thousand years on, a corrosive doctrine of the divine right of kings.
—Los Angeles Times, 5 Aug. 2021
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America’s social contract was that liberty and self-determination was a more powerful engine of human freedom than vassalage and the divine right of kings.
—TIME, 9 Jan. 2024
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The idea that rural white men are more virtuous, and thus more American, than other people is deeply embedded in our nation’s mythology, and aligned with perspectives that see white Anglo-Saxons as superior by divine right.
—Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2019
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But absolutist claims of divine right to territory appear impossible to reconcile.
—Roger Cohen, New York Times, 20 Nov. 2023
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Given this context, perhaps we Americans are envious that the British have something as historically sturdy as the divine right of kings to legitimate vast, hereditary, and permanent inequality and enshrine its maintenance as a civic virtue.
—Suzanne Schneider, The New Republic, 27 Sep. 2022
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'divine right.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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