Word: beggar
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...enough to remember when a beggar merely held out his cap and asked for an unspecified sum for an unspecified purpose. I can remember: "Sir, will you give me a nickel for a cup of coffee?" and the great democratic and inflationary shift to "Brother, can you spare a dime?" I have even been held up at pistol point and asked for $1.60 -no more, no less -an experience which Max Weber would somehow have been able to work into his great work Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I never expected to live long enough...
What would St. Francis have said to the beggar who was rolled by the Assisian equivalent of a beautiful call girl and wanted to get to the Assisian equivalent of Wall Street? Mutatis mutandis, what would Robert Owen have said? Or Lenin? Or Kingsley Martin? Or Franklin Roosevelt? Or Emily Post? Or Freud? As for my friends and me, words failed us. Neither our education nor our experience nor our principles had prepared us for this encounter. Ours is, indeed, a rich and wonderful country-glamorous beyond belief. A bum can no longer suffer mere misfortune; he must be "rolled...
Beauty and the Devil does, however, occasionally stumble. Toward the end, for example, the light vein is momentarily broken by Faust's sudden philosophic despair. ("The poorest beggar at least owns his own soul," he complains to his lover.) Nevertheless, the picture, enlivened by Leon Barsacq's lavish sets, is a distinct triumph of French joie de vivre over the sombre morality of previous Faust legends...
Priority No. 2. Put back Franco-American relations on a healthy basis. This can only be achieved if France ceases to stand like a beggar in the U.S. bread line...
...seat for Red China. The U.S. might agree to exclude Nationalist China from the Security Council, he suggested helpfully, and admit Red China to the Assembly. And then after a while, Red China could be moved up to the Council. Khrushchev became very angry. China was not a "beggar," he snapped, but a great nation seeking its rights. "A very downright person," Attlee pronounced...