Word: cynics
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...writes her verse-as a considerable public will also read it-as a breather from sitting pretty. No cynic but a broad-minded wincer at spiritual unhappiness, Hay tries to reconcile religious reverence for life's possibilities with lay disappointment in its facts...
...Washington have heard that roly-poly Howard Hopson, kingpin of $1,038,000,000 Associated Gas & Electric Co., was so ill he was under an oxygen tent. Since Mr. Hopson has often been "ill" when the Government wanted him for hearings and investigations of his fabulous operations, many a cynic wondered whether the utility magnate's latest indisposition was a portent of further trouble...
...School for Dictators consists entirely of dialogues, between three characters. One, Silone's mouthpiece, is an exiled Italian Socialist nicknamed Thomas the Cynic, who, using mainly Italian and German sources, is writing a political treatise on the art of deception. He believes that "the deceivers have nothing to learn from it, while the deceived have." His pupils are two Americans: Mr. W., a well-known U. S. politician and ex-jazz musician, regarded as the coming U. S. dictator, and Professor Pickup, a decayed Billy Sunday sort of fanatic, who originated "Neo-Sociology...
Thomas the Cynic assures Mr. W. that his inhibited childhood, his artistic frustration, fake War record, headaches and schizophrenia constitute excellent personal assets for a dictator. He explains how these handicaps can be turned into heroic myths, explains how to fight Socialism with the catch phrases of Socialism, how to provoke disorder and terror as a pretext to establish order, how to avoid all argument based on rationality, how to exploit the plentiful relics of primitive barbarism which still survive in modern man, and thus turn to Fascist account a Freudian discovery which Socialists naively underrated...
...wants to know what the chances are of starting a Fascist dictatorship in the U. S. That depends on the Americans, replies Thomas the Cynic. The Fascists' main advantage, he says, lies in the inertia of democratic leaders who tend to live "on the yield of their ancestors' conquests," are prone to be morally defeated before the fight begins. After a big crisis from which there is no return to the status quo, these leaders cannot hold power and Socialists are too timid or too weak to take it. Says the Cynic: Mr. W., there's your...