precept

While generally true, the precept doesn’t hold in the case of playwright Athol Fugard, whose body of work helped transform the history of his nation.

"We tell people that if you follow the rules, your vote counts, and this effort is really going hard after that basic precept of democracy," she told Salon in a phone interview.

Some mayors also have powers to charge their own precept on council tax - although not all those that do have that power actually charge one.

Even Aristotle, who could be said to have launched literary criticism, set forth the precepts of tragedy by empirically studying the indelible examples of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, these new mandarins will stay resolutely wedded to the necessity of American unilateralism, their guiding precept being “unilateralism whenever possible, multilateralism only when necessary.”