Word: evil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Middle Ages, for instance, the left-hander lived in danger of being accused of practicing witchcraft. The Devil himself was considered a southpaw, and he and other evil spirits were always conjured up by left-handed gestures. Even today, language expresses the general prejudice against lefthanders. A lefthanded compliment is actually an insult, the Latin word sinister (left) has taken on a, well, sinister cast, and the French word gauche, which means left, is used to describe a socially awkward person. In Moslem societies, the left hand is considered unclean...
...FROM DAMNATION. Certain human deeds, says Berger, in the common experience of mankind seem "not only evil, but monstrously evil." The archetypal example is the Nazi mass execution of the Jews. Man is "constrained to condemn, and condemn absolutely," the villainy of an Eichmann, and that condemnation derives from a belief that when a person commits such crimes, "he separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human...
...Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is Brecht's play to prevent Hitler by, or rather, future Hitlers. It is as if a public accountant were to attempt to sum up the nature of evil on a balance sheet. Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Roehm, under various aliases are presented as Chicago gangsters who muscle into a vegetable trust (the depression-ravaged German industrialists) and bulldoze the honest but senile leading citizen (Hindenburg) into legalizing their protection racket...
From Cotton Mather to J. Edgar Hoover, America's best vice fighters have displayed an unappeasable fervor for coming to grips with evil that might be described as a Moby Dick complex. Allan Pinkerton and his sons William and Robert-founder and scions of a family whose name is synonymous with sleuthing-are no exceptions. Toward the criminals they pursued for twelve decades, from Jesse James to Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, the Pinkertons seemed to direct the same obsessive passions Melville imputed to Captain Ahab, who was a first-class tracker by any detective's standards: "He piled...
...walkie-talkies, and protect the clam-and oyster-seed beds of Long Island with a radar-equipped Pinkerton navy. Passion has given way to technology. For the enduring challenge of any personal crusade against the forces of darkness requires simplicity of means, and the possibility of confrontation with evil personified. Given the choice, Ahab might well have accepted radar and sonar aboard the Pequod but the Great Whale's looming, symbolic presence would soon have been reduced to a series of blips and bongs...