Word: cynic
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...come back to us, Robert A. Heinlein, amateur astronomer, former naval person, practical engineer, supreme cynic, ideological flibbertigibbet, magnificent story-teller. It will be too much to take if the bad madness of the nation has ruined...
...Hawthorne's allegorical short story, Young Goodman Brown, the ingenuous Puritan wanders into the forest one dark night and catches all his friends, neighbors and saintly village elders in mortal sin-in this case devil worship. It might have been just a dream, but it made a lifelong cynic of young Brown. Much the same thing happened not long ago to a young reporter named Charley Thompson, who wandered into Jacksonville. Fla. The sin was not devil worship but pollution, a suitable modern equivalent. And it was no dream...
...patrol's commanding officer (Denholm Elliott) is a well-bred British fumbler who keeps getting his men bushwhacked on an island in the South Pacific. The cynic-in-residence is a cool-eyed cockney medic (Michael Caine), who alternates between bandaging the wounded and needling his commander. A reluctant Japanese-language specialist seconded from the American Navy (Cliff Robertson) is straight out of The Bridge on the River Kwai; he becomes the company pragmatist who is determined only to save his own neck. The rest of the motley crew consists of bellyaching foot soldiers (Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Lance...
...this point, the question becomes obvious: what is the value of a "humanistic" society when it administers justice in a utilitarian fashion? The cynic's-answer, possibly the most relevant, is that we have the best society and best university to be hoped for at this particular moment in time...
Throughout the conversation, I seemed to detect beneath a superficial cynicism a nostalgia for the past. Jona than Kramer sounded very much like Dickens' Father Time, or like the aged child-cynic, a bitter girl in late adolescence, wishing desperately she could recapture virgin innocence...