Word: basest
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...present. The Elizabethan view of man was being threatened by a triple revolution. Copernicus had challenged the earth-centered universe, Montaigne had skeptically consigned man to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom, and Machiavelli had argued that statecraft was a matter of the basest self-interest, devoid of moral principle. Modern man has seen Einstein throw a curve into the cosmos, Freud lift the lid on the cauldron of the unconscious, and Marx upturn continents with the doctrine of dialectical material ism in which the end justifies the means...
...asked a veteran diplomat if the Soviet attitude was, on a certain subject, "genuine" and "sincere." He answered dryly: "The most menacing thing about this country is that its leaders are the most sincere liars in history. When uttering the basest lies, they are at their most sincere...
...campaign panders to the very basest instincts of the least mature members of the University," the Yale Daily News commented earlier. Observing that the contest was conducted with "less than unassailable good taste," the News called this promotion "symptomatic of drives and attitudes favoring the gaudy and the gauche that are apparently inherent in the Yale mind...
Shakespeare is throwing this mud at Britain's Richard of Gloucester, alias "Richard Crookback," better known as Richard III. Generations of students have gasped with horror at the monstrous doings of Britain's basest king, notorious for the murder of his young nephews ("The Little Princes in the Tower''). Not for three centuries did historians begin to wonder whether Crookback could possibly have been quite so crooked. Now. Ohio University Historian Paul Kendall has tried once more to get at the truth...
...meant to be, although the anger at times sounds almost old-fashioned in an age when the gallows take far fewer lives than more modern means of destruction. Author Duff will convince all but the most sadistic reader that the gallows are brutal, and that even the basest criminals are too good for hanging. But all he may accomplish is that reformers will propose some more efficient or humanitarian substitutes for the gallows-such as the neat old guillotine, the quick bullet in the back of the neck, or the concentration camp, where prisoners may die unhurriedly and without benefit...