A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer.
In the colloquial sense, a petition is a document addressed to some official and signed by numerous individuals. A petition may be oral rather than written, and in this era may be transmitted via the Internet.
Read more about Petition: Legal, Early History, Modern Use
Famous quotes containing the word petition:
“Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don’t pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was ‘nothing in comparison with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.’”
—State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)