Word: conceit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Brown's definition: "A human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...
Niffle meant a "human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...
...Chief handmaiden to such power is big politics. In the present instance, our chief executive had the ill fortune to be baptized into an order that believed in playing politics for keeps, an order that could lead normally honest men to place personal power, the conceit to do as one pleases, above public interest. Nero, the fiddler while Rome burned, began as a good ruler...
Never a man to make things easy for himself, Director Hitchcock has tried in Stage Fright to work within the discipline of a tricky story conceit: his heroine (Jane Wyman) plays romantic nip & tuck simultaneously with a suspected murderer (Richard Todd) and the Scotland Yard man (Michael Wilding) who is tracking him down. Hitchcock exploits the situation as much for chuckles as for chills. The result is an entertaining show, handsomely produced against a London background, studded with effective scenes and enlivened by an excellent cast that includes an uncannily young and beautiful Marlene Dietrich and able British Comedian Alistair...
...Harry Truman was really looking for a working definition of "statism" (see The Presidency), New York's Senator John Foster Dulles was happy to oblige. "Statism," said Dulles, "represents man's conceit that he can build better than God. God created men & women with great moral possibilities . . . But sometimes those in power lose faith in their fellow men . . . They take more & more of the fruits of human labor, so that they may, as they think, do more & more for human welfare . . . That process . . . makes human beings into mere cogs in a man-made machine...