Word: half-truth
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Exasperated critics frequently took the failure of feeling further and said that Shaw's characters were unreal, that they were no more than walking arguments. This is a half-truth, though it is a fact that Shaw did not believe in character for its own sake. Few Victorian writers did. His eye for the middle-class milieu was perfect. He knew exactly the values beneath the humbug and was only rash in assuming that men and women can live without it. Candida is an excellent portrait of a woman and so is the delightful Major Barbara. The theater...
...Philip Wylies, the Cassandras, the Twentieth Century prophets of doom ceaselessly cry out in the wilderness of materialism. And well might they wail, for the instances of greed, ignorance, needless poverty, waste, hunger, violence, falsehood, hypocrisy, and half-truth are so plentiful that merely to enumerate them would be a Sisyphean labor. But the black gulf of pessimism is not the place to seek the understanding, the patience, the faith that is required by a generation that hopes to bequeathe a world at least somewhat better than one to inherited. Things as they are appear much less disheartening if viewed...
...were not for its heartbreaking subject, Sister Kenny could be lauded as a slick, above-average screen biography. But the whole subject of polio, its cause and its treatment, is of deep concern to every parent in the world. Any distortion or any half-truth on the subject can be both cruel and dangerous. The film's most outstanding distortions, implied rather than explicitly stated...
...served up a ready-made peace, but a set of treaty sketches with 26 questions still left wide open, including many major issues such as internationalization of the Danube. When Jimmy Byrnes snapped: "Those who fought the war should make the peace," he merely summed up the self-evident half-truth that not all nations are created equal and that a peace based on the fiction of equality would not work...
...fighting had never been adequately spelled out. Franklin Roosevelt, looking for a name for the war, could come up with nothing better than "The War for Survival." Arthur Koestler, viewing the whole catastrophe with detachment, said that it was a war in which a lie fought against a half-truth. In such a contest, the lie had had a tremendous psychological advantage...