Word: cynics
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...fancy man. Back in Paris, he finished medical school, practiced in a slum, got mixed up in an attempted murder, and ended as the unwilling locum tenens of a lunatic asylum. Daring Author Céline makes Bardamu tell his story himself, lets him show himself a cowardly cynic, timeserver, hypocrite, liar, tacitly defies the onlooker to cast the first stone. Many a reader will find nothing handy to throw. Shocking to the Goncourt Academicians mainly for stylistic reasons (says Defender Daudet: ''It is written in Parisian colloquial speech, a very special language, superficially lazy yet fundamentally exact...
...indignation by writing letters: Casper Milquetoast, in a fit of public spirit, wrote to the Pullman company about insects in his berth and promptly received a complimentary and apologetic letter two pages long. He proudly displayed this to his friends as proof that corporations do have souls, until some cynic discovered and pointed out to him a faint penciled note on the back: 'Send this s.o.b. the bug letter...
...diamond fields-90% of the world's diamonds. He entered the South African Parliament, and nine years later was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. By bribery, intrigue, diplomacy, persuasion, force he worked to bring about a united South Africa. Like most men of action a mixture of cynic and sentimentalist, he made no bones of his tricky actions but could not bear to have his ambition thought sordid...
...said that a certain Elizabethan poet, a rugged fellow and something of a cynic, ordered that a Latin inscription be carved under his name on his tombstone, which translated reads: "Dedicated to Oblivion." The Vagabond, like a bad preacher, has put the text at the end of the sermon, but perhaps it can pass for a moral as well...
...Vagabond was, they said, cynical, but they were wrong. There are excuses in this mortal life for anything, if they must be given, and while it is better to let the scoffing charge pass unnoticed, cynical is a hard word. Everyone may go by a softer name but the cynic. The sinister, cheerful lawbreaker who warms your entrails is an "importer." He who steals your trashy purse because you pay safely by check, is no usurer, but a respectable banker. So along the line, gentlemen all, does the world avoid rasping unpleasantness, except the cynic, whose avocation of cavity...