Word: abyss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...daughter -- seemed to many to be a miracle. To others it was profoundly, if sometimes obscurely, troubling. It called up brutal images -- baby farming, cannibalizing for spare parts. Many saw in the story the near edge of a dangerous slippery slope at the bottom of which they glimpsed an abyss, and maybe the shadow of Dr. Mengele at work...
...bright transparency. But much of the map would be speckled and blotched. Over Third World and First World, over cities and plains and miserable islands would be smudges of evil, ragged blights, storm systems of massacre or famine, murders, black snows. Here and there, a genocide, a true abyss...
...movie budget shouldn't interest moviegoers; they pay the same ticket price for the cult hit Poison as they do for Godfather 3. But Hollywood went haywire last summer with action adventures, leaving the genre in a deep hole. And from that abyss crawls this year's budget behemoth, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnold Schwarzenegger got a $14 million jet as his salary, but even if he had worked for free, the movie would have cost more than $80 million, or about five times what the original Terminator brought its distributor. The early word is that...
...meeting in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev assured me that his current turn toward the reactionaries is just a temporary detour. But the evidence is overwhelming that he is leading the U.S.S.R. toward the abyss. In the absence of radical reform, the Soviet Union will become an irrelevant and crippled empire -- a nuclear superpower with a Third World economy, unable to play a major role on the world stage. This is good news in one sense because it means a declining Soviet threat. But it is also bad news because, as I told Gorbachev in 1986 and again in our recent...
...Christianity in the West. The notion grew that there were admirable lives (hagiographies) to be emulated and horrible examples to avoid. The old curiosity remained, to be sure; how else to explain the legends about Napoleon's sexual capacities and the insatiability of Catherine the Great? But the theological abyss between the saved and the damned strained the pursuit of objective truth. In the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, a devout Christian and a leading biographer of his age, complained, "There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even...