Word: cynically
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...reputation as a court jester for Hollywood sophisticates troubles Abe. He resents being called a cynic: "Cynics disbelieve real things; I disbelieve phonies." He claims he is working roughly along the lines of Will Rogers, except that he uses a piano instead of a rope. "The people . . . are just like me. ... I don't want to talk like Carl Sandburg, but I like the people...
...terms and the amazing Burr conspiracy, of Madison's two terms and the War of 1812, of the struggles of the young democracy against enemies at home & abroad. Started when Adams was still in his 40's-long before he became the cackling old cynic convinced that the world was going to pot-the work was his scholarly masterpiece and occupied what were probably his best years...
Nowhere in his work has this fusion been more fully realized than in "All The King's Men," It is a story told through the person of Jack Burden-- newspaper man, intellectual, and above all, cynic. A man of intelligence whose life has been largely wasted, symbol of the sterility and deracination of modern man who can find nothing on which to center his life and thereby lend it meaning. But although he tells it, the story is not Jack Burden's, it is Willie Stark's, the mock-heroic man of the people whose earnestness "to do good...
...Conant, realization of the hard cold facts of the atomic age is only half the battle, for he believes that America cannot develop as a free nation either by subscribing to the pious faith in the lasting effects of revolution, or escaping into the enervating and oftentimes reactionary cynicism. Rather than the sentimentalist or the cynic, he calls for a hard-boiled idealist "whose mode of action is in terms of the calculated risk and who, in order to calculate that risk, prefers to talk in terms of concrete and limited objectives...
...exposition of a role on which Moliere leaves his audience as judge. Lubchansky's interpretation is most notable for its absence, and although he competently portrays Alceste's disillusionment and dark anger, he plays the role straight, leaving his listeners to decide whether he is a justifiably pessimistic cynic or a ridiculous crank...