Word: foolishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pusey came to Harvard from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, to become President of an enormous institution built on layer after layer of sedimented traditions. A slow and delicate play of subterranean forces had brought it to its current stature, a vast and complex machinery that it would be foolish to meddle with too deeply. The University might change, but it would have to change more through a process of natural evolution than through administrative decisions initiating and guiding change...
What fun A.N. Wilson has with these foolish mortals. Love Unknown is his tenth novel, and his command of caustic social comedy seems complete. He is pitiless in describing the cliches of adultery so eagerly embraced by his lovers -- Simon's nattering about whether his many "meaningless" affairs have rendered him unfit for nobler passion, Monica's inflating to Wagnerian grandeur her demand that he leave his wife. Meanwhile, domesticity grinds on relentlessly, and it is the urgent and unpredictable demands of his large, eccentric family that finally defeat Simon...
Legally, that failure is probably not punishable. But the moral point remains. The Boland amendment may be foolish or even disastrous policy. Nonetheless, for all the ambiguities of its changing versions, it is the law, and the Constitution gives the President no latitude to choose which laws he will honor...
...thing to support the right to walk alone at night without fear. It is another thing to stand in the dark in Harvard Yard, clutching a candle and feeling foolish, in support of that right. As I scanned the crowd for familiar faces, I remembered the last time I had been involved in a political demonstration. Ten years ago, people wearing white had marched on Washington for the ERA. The Amendment had been defeated, and the march was written off as little more than a failed symbolic gesture...
...also say that the President would become vapidly happy, unrealistically upbeat, forgetful, unfazed by impending crisis, and uninterested in important details. What it come down to, of course, is that we would end up with a president much like Ronald Reagan, except without a dangerous, warlike mentality. As for foolish barriers to the plan, such as the bother-some "just say no" campaign--dudes, just be cool...