Word: dictums
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...popular novels, and the evangelistic campaigns. The editors, writers and Billy Sundays do not care so much for quality; their cry is for more circulation, more editions more Main Street homes reached, more agate lines, more souls saved. The phrase "Barnum was right" does not apply exclusively to his dictum that a sucker is born every minute. It applies to his whole conception of America's ruling passion...
Probably no philosophy of news but the nature and quality of news itself. No fair-minded person would agree with Sczornic's dictum that " all teachers are intransitives," but any one who has considered the facts would admit at once that very few teachers ever find themselves in situations which display those aspects of their personalities having headline value. The personality of a teacher may be, and usually is, of the first importance to his pupils. But his pupils do not buy the newspapers...
...somewhat mythical T.B.M. is demonstrated by the work of Florenz Ziegfeld and John Murray Anderson. The genius of these two gentlemen is responsible for raising the general level of musical revues in America far above that of any other country. They refused to subscribe to the trade dictum that people like the old jokes best, or that the old tunes can be polished up to look like new, or that stage sets designed by a scenic factory are for all practical purposes as effective as those designed by artists like Joseph Urban and Robert Locher. In short, they...
...Beggar's Opera" took London by surprise and fifty years later it was still a favorite theme for polite dispute. The occasion on which Johnson coined this mouth-filling dictum is memorable for another reason; -- the attentive Boswell for once disagreed with his master's defense of the play, and declared "the gaiety and heroines of a highwayman very captivating to a youthful imagination", and a temptation which "it requires a cool and strong judgment to resist". Boswell was not alone in his brave opposition; no loss a figure than Edmund Burke "thought the literary merit of "The Beggar...
...occupied in the pursuit of parchment letters to add to our names are all lumped together--by a writer in the "Transcript" as "that painful figure--the college boy." The same philosopher concludes his dissertation by advising us that the sooner we accept with "strong humility" Thackeray's dictum that at twenty-one a boy is an ass; the sooner we can resume our high ambition of becoming great and useful men and "shaking a loose and happy leg as sixty." A critic in New York declares the life of the average college man to be largely the result...