Word: absolutist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even if one fails to be convinced by the arguments for anti-gay policies, how to behave towards groups with such policies is a far more complex issue than it seems. The absolutist solutions that have so far prevailed--boycotts of one sort or another--appear morally pure at first but are really a form of "not in my back yard." Boycotts express the naive belief that refusal to be tainted by association with offending groups will have as salutary an effect on the community as it will on one's own character...
...take part in the elections, it would probably win several seats. It is important -- if shocking -- to realize that the Khmer Rouge do have support in Cambodia. Some people see them as nationalists and incorrupt -- but there is no reason to believe they have changed their brutal and absolutist policies...
...Elderfield points out in a catalog essay, Matisse's luck with the critics has always been peculiar. At the outset, part of the tiny modern-art public in Paris thought his work incoherent, ugly. Others, like Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis, praised its absolutist devotion to "painting in itself, the pure act of painting." But there was never a shortage of critics who saw Matisse as a kind of magisterial lightweight. "It is a modiste's taste," wrote the poet Andre Salmon in 1912, "whose love of color equals the love of chiffon...
...definitiveness -- whose united beauty, magnificence and strangeness shall convey the idea of care, or culture . . . on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity . . ." Yes, one can well imagine Magritte liking that. His work too sets up a parallel world, extremely strange and yet familiar, ruled by an absolutist imagination...
...Paul rejected any absolutist approach both to particular legal controversies and to the more enduring antitheses of the individual and society," Brennan said. "At times, Paul's emphasis on balance led him to criticize the court on which I served," he said...