Sentence examples for could be possessed from inspiring English sources

He is said to have explained that chess pieces could be possessed by devils and be against you when you played.

He said that in the Congo basin, which includes Cabinda, the past five years had seen a growth in the belief that children could be possessed, and a growth in fundamentalist Christian churches exploiting such fears.

His character and the education that the Army had given him at service schools and civilian universities had combined to produce a man who could be possessed by the task that faced him and at the same time sufficiently detached to discern its root elements.

The town grew up around a station named after one of the contractors who built the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which drew European settlers to the Canadian prairies because, under the Dominion Lands Act, a quarter-section of land (160 acres) could be possessed without payment if a homesteader cultivated a quarter of it within three years.

This is problematic in that either these archaic features reflect an origin far removed from that of living placental and marsupial mammals or else a mechanism must be found to explain how these features could be possessed by a group that is closely related to mammals without these traits.

This sense is distinct from any sort of ethical sense; it could be possessed or lacked by both virtuous and villainous politicians.

For example, this characteristic could be: possessing this specific genotype, reaching the 'primitive streak' stage, the beginning of cerebral bioelectrical activity, reaching the stage of being able to live independently outside the mother's body, and so on (Ramsey 1970; Ford 1988, Serra, Colombo 1998; Warnock 2003).

He told the interrogators: "Could I have blacked out... and done this?" and adding, "Could I be possessed?" That led to the disputed admissions.

"Could I be possessed?" Largely on the basis of his own words, he was tried and convicted.

How could it not be possessed of the capacity for anger or punishment?

But if the invasion of Iraq emboldens American ideologues to the point of triumphalism and hubris, to the point where every world-transforming fantasy is to be proposed and indulged without brake, then those whose historical analogy of choice was 1914 could prove to be possessed not only of a tragic view of life but also of a terrifyingly convincing argument.