Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...should our outrage be dampened, rather than inflamed, by knowing that these atrocities are common? Well, you cannot focus your rage against an evil that is universal. You deepen your sadness with stories--think back to the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, for example. Everyone in America wanted to hang those two in Chicago for murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks as a sort of Nietzschean thrill; Clarence Darrow, with a magnificent speech against the death penalty, got the idiots off with life imprisonment. Nathan Leopold was released in 1958 and lived to the age of 66, strolling upon...
...theologian in us speaks of evil and has the floor when outrages against children are committed. For evil is a concept that blossoms out of the causeless, and crimes against children seem the least explicable of human brutalities...
...psychiatric appeaser goes to work on causes: if an act can be explained and is therefore part of behavioral cause and effect (well, Hitler had an unhappy childhood, therefore ...), then it does not deserve the name of evil. Which, the theologian replies, is nonsense: the person who did the deed may be a victim himself or may have merely been having a bad-hair day, as someone remarked in trying to figure out Susan Smith's murder of her children in a South Carolina lake. But the deed is, indelibly, evil...
...asked, in my memory the only student especially concerned about the mysterious news. "Has the President been shot?" It was, of course, the Challenger explosion that Mr.Cohen spoke of. But to me the news was a relief. The explosion was a tragedy of science, not a triumph of human evil. President Reagan and the stability he embodied would Iive...
...evil man, leading a truly evil empire, but he is also a very powerful man who holds the lives of hundreds of millions in his hands. For that reason alone, it is important to listen to what Chinese President Jiang Zemin has to say if he does come to Harvard. However, he should be heard in a forum where tasteful protesters are welcomed more warmly than the speaker himself. It is important to show Chinese citizens that in the U.S., we give people their say, and challenge them without fear for our lives or livelihoods. It is important to show...