Word: corrupts
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...Sade's rage at the world was irrepressible. In two other novels, Justine and Juliette, he created an aristocracy of sexual perverts who inhabit lonely castles where they have unlimited license to commit foul crimes; where the most heroic is the most corrupt; where the true heroine does not try to preserve her virtue but to lose it as quickly as possible. Eventually, De Sade could not put on paper crimes vicious enough to satisfy him. "To attack the sun," he wrote, "to deprive the universe of it or to use it to set the world ablaze -these would...
Moral hypocrisy and human selfishness are no less favorite subjects of writers today than in other corrupt ages. Yet so often variations on this theme lapse into ponderous, and therefore ineffective, moralizing. But when our grosser sins, not only our foibles, are presented to us with wit and grace we take notice. Often the barbed needles of the comic writer pierce far deeper than the heavy blows of the ostensiby more serious dramatist...
Nietzsche preached that Christianity was a plot by the weak to emasculate the strong. Feiffer suggests that the compulsion to "break through to others" is a disease spread by the insecure to corrupt the self-possessed. This kind of love does not stop with the individual -it seeks to embrace the world. Seeking love and finding oneself, says Feiffer, is an ultimate contradiction in terms...
...charge d'affaires in Port-au-Prince to "resume normal diplomatic relations." The Haitian radio crowed of Duvalier's "triumph of statesmanship," and Papa Doc sent his goons to raze a two-mile strip along the Dominican border to halt the stream of political refugees fleeing his corrupt and bloody regime...
Today, intellectuals are in government. But as a group, and as always, they are worried. Where once they resented their exclusion from power, they now fear it may corrupt them. Here Hofstadter shows real impatience with his lodge brothers. "The great intellectuals of pagan antiquity," writes Hofstadter, "the doctors of the medieval universities, the scholars of the Renaissance, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, sought a conjunction of knowledge and power and accepted its risks without optimism or naivete...