Word: charlatan
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...Iron Curtain, Europe's drive for unity, disorder and dictatorship in many of the lands that had once been part of Empire. At the end, few who paid him tribute remembered how bitterly the old statesman had been reviled in his time. Denounced in turn as charlatan, braggart, turncoat and warmonger, he was many times defeated at the polls, swept from high office, made the scapegoat of others' failures. But if Churchill was sometimes wrong, on the great issues of his times he was most often right. History will forgive his faults; it can never forget the indomitable...
...Descartes, France has been equally hospitable to Nostradamus and Cagliostro. Ordinarily tightfisted Frenchmen pay more than a billion dollars annually-more than France spends on scientific research-to an odd-lot collection of soothsayers, seers, fortunetellers, clairvoyants, gypsies, faith healers and prophets. In Paris alone, there is one charlatan for every 120 Parisians, compared with one doctor for every 514 citizens and one priest for every...
...FRANCIS BACON: "It is undeniable that Bacon has about him something of the magnificent charlatan. He is full of large utterance, but himself performs little. His own experimenting was unprofitable, and he ignored some of the best work of his contemporaries. But as the buccinator novi temporis (trumpeter of a new age), he is without an equal, and the next three centuries rightly regarded him as the seer, or even the poet, of science. Although he is reputed to be the father of the English essay, he despised the Epicurean life to which most of the essayists have been temperamentally...
...some secretarial work to do, and he repaid his benefactor by painting him as a kind of cultural public-relations man who took the "rediscovered imagery" of "tough, miserable men" like Apollinaire and Max Jacob and "vulgarized the knowledge of it." Andre Malraux, too, "was something of the charlatan," but Gide was the wholly incorruptible artist, a man with a face that "no fattening passion burdened" and with lips "straight as those of someone who has never lied...
...always used to think of President Kennedy as a Madison Avenue charlatan and agreed with very few of his ideas, but now I find myself asking: What can I do for my country...