Word: dictums
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...psychology that distinguished contemporaries like Ernst Gombrich or Adrian Stokes. Clark was a pre-Freudian and, though he was too wise to try to dismiss the sort of art that comes from the dark side of the mind, he felt ill at ease with extreme expressions. Pascal's dictum that the ego is detestable-Le moi est haïssable-was his motto, and he lived up to it with guarded mandarin decorum...
...affair of the faked diaries has raised grave questions of journalistic duty. Stern's staff concluded, in a dictum that had unique emotional force in West Germany, though less practical application elsewhere: "Even if the diaries were genuine, publication in Stern should have been forbidden in consideration of the victims of Nazi power." In the U.S., historians and social scientists labeled the diaries legitimate news, if authentic, but condemned some coverage as sensational. Concluded Yale University Psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton: "In the melodrama unfolding before us, responsibility to history or to profound moral questions was lost in the intensity...
...collaboration, a translation if you like . . . plagiarism is a different matter," declares a character in Ararat. D.M. Thomas has set out to prove that dictum. In The White Hotel, his collaborative efforts were a critical and popular success. That novel began as an ingenious imitation of a case history by Freud, then moved to an account of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, originally written by a Russian novelist, Anatoli Kuznetsov. But what was an effective device in The White Hotel has become a conceit in Ararat. The density of literary allusion in Thomas' latest novel...
...responsibility system" approved last September by the congress of the Communist Party, which meets periodically to decide government policy. Many of the old Maoist economic shibboleths, including the idea that incentives should not be used to promote productivity, have been cast aside. Instead, in keeping with Deng's dictum that "a cat, whether black or white, is a good one as long as it catches mice," the government has turned to such capitalistic devices as bonuses, commissions and competition to rejuvenate China's sluggish economy...
...savings and investments from taxation. Even the exemption for the interest on home mortgages is a form of tax shelter. All are perfectly legal. Tax avoidance-in contrast to tax evasion-is the term for all such legitimate efforts to keep taxes to a minimum. In the famous dictum of Judge Learned Hand, "Nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands." Many tax shelters, however, pay off only at upper-income levels and can be figured out only by expensive experts...