Word: hobgoblin
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...consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then recent Harvard basketball teams have had heads which are quite swelled to say the least. Wins over Cornell have preceded defeats to Princeton, and by the time March 5 rolls around, the cagers find themselves in third place in the Ivies, with an overall record of something like...
...true nature of the research. On the other hand, Smith says, to inform the parents fully of aberrant behavior they allegedly could anticipate is equally unethical and unfair to an innocent child. Such behavior patterns have not been documented, and saddling a child's parents with such a hobgoblin might only be, as even Walzer conceded in a grant application, "detrimental to the child's development." Parents overconcerned with their boy's manifestations of deviance might only insure that such deviance would appear, hopelessly prejudicing the findings of the scientists who come around twice a year to interview the family...
...most menacing hobgoblin to the student protestors was the marginal category. Originally billed by the faculty as a warning to only those students who wee on the verge of failure, the marginal rank had been stretched by some graders to include one-sixth of the class...
...past ten years. Dirksen commanded the power to alter the directions of the nation, and sometimes he almost gave the impression of whimsicality in the causes he embraced. At times, he was a man of stupefying inconsistency. But then Dirksen always was fond of quoting Emerson on the hobgoblin of little minds. It was Dirksen, an old supporter of Joe McCarthy. who almost singlehanded kept the utterly superfluous Subversive Activities Control Board in business two years ago. It was Ev, too, who had been seeking a constitutional convention to overturn the Supreme Court's one-man one-vote decision...
...that war; the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists raptly read the tea leaves of presidential pronouncements for clues to the seriousness of the U.S. resolve. Yet precisely because what the U.S. President says in one place is instantly replayed in many others, consistency becomes not a hobgoblin but a necessity in the sober conduct of foreign affairs...