Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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President Quincy retired in 1845, and before his death at age 92, wrote voluminously. A History of Harvard, a biography of his father, and a History of Boston are among his major works. But the old, dour Puritan must have spent much time in contemplation, looking over a life filled with public activity...
Most College students, however, seem content to sip silently the sugar and honey of reassuring slogans, and as the nation's foreign and domestic problems grow in their complexity, a once thriving breed of rugged radicals is dying a lingering death. In the place of vigorous protest and proposals, a majority of today's undergraduates--calling themselves "moderate liberals"--voice either vague satisfaction or, at worst, a perplexed feeling that something, somewhere, is wrong...
...through an infinite nothing? Has it not become colder? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Is not night and more night coming on all the while?...God is dead. What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us--for the sake of this deed he will be part...
...Death of the Soul
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes politics immensely the more serious; it could be the spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate: "a higher history than all history hitherto." The orthodox have always talked as if losing the hope of immortality would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. But their opponents might well reply that quite the opposite is true: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul, one's hopes...