Word: cynics
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...contrast, the Yale president praised two idealists-New York Mayor John Lindsay and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin-as alumni who have been "quite unabashed, wholly unashamed of their high purpose." He urged his audience to affirm five propositions that give the lie to the cynic: "We know that happiness is more than material wellbeing, that conscience is more than simple fear, that love is more than sex, that moral authority is more than political power, and that community is more than organization." As for himself, Brewster added, he will continue to draw on what is perhaps the most important...
...duties we expect them to perform. It becomes more evident every year that success at the bat and oar is only to be obtained by persevering and enthusiastic labor. Let no petty or local dispute interfere where the honor of the University is at stake. The careless and cynic spirit should be frowned down; and everyone should seek to contribute, in the way most suited to his abilities, to the honor and eminence of Harvard. Let those who are blessed with a good biceps grasp the bat or the oar: let those who have not that too common holy reverence...
...Four-Gated City, however, is persuasive evidence that the New Romanticism, properly so-called, goes a lot further than just the celebration of the immediate. It retains a view of history. It makes no attempt to erase the undeniable downhill slide of civilization. For, before Romanticism, must come cynicism. And the cynic says men were never very good. There were only fewer of them. Mrs. Lessing pinpoints the popularization of jazz along with its "patient long-suffering tolerance of other people's disabilities, loyalty to one's intimates, a contained despair" as the beginning of a romanticism of despair...
...become an unthinking mouthpiece for Nazi ideology. Kazakh, a purposeless intellectual uncertain about his future or his feelings, has turned from engineering to become a hypnotist and a pioneer in advertising with nouveau riche connections. Curiously, it is Kazakh who comes closest to being a callous cynic. Wirthof, despite his crass behavior in bordellos, his egotistic mistreatment of acquaintances and his sensual brutality, is actually the overemotional romantic...
Brecht lived by what he always pretended to suppress: his sentiment bordering on sentimentality, the lyric-cynic play of his heart and mind, a vein of mordant humor, and his drink-drenched ability to keep one eye on the dawn and the other on the clogged gutter of life. He claimed that the greatest single influence on his prose was the Lutheran Bible, and there was something of the masked disciple of Christ in him. His Communism was basically a desire to multiply the loaves and fishes for the multitude...