Word: humanist
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...born as a microscopic ripple in a perfect vacuum, not so very new an idea, since Thomas Aquinas proposed something similar seven centuries ago. Although the good saint was never excommunicated for such heretical views, he was under constant fire from zealots as a sort of premature secular humanist...
...68th year, modern Russia's greatest humanist and libertarian died in the way that most befitted his life -- in the midst of combat for his country's freedoms. He had spent the day of Dec. 14 at a tempestuous meeting of the Interregional Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the establishment of an alternative political party in opposition to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering...
...Binyan's error is in thinking that the Tiananmen Square movement was wasted effort. International opinion was galvanized by the idea and image of non-violent students, gathered to express humanist ideals, bloodily crushed. If this movement is kept alive and if it eventually does succeed, the students of Tiananmen will rank among the historic martyrs of the world. Liu Binyan is right is saying that many things were and are lacking from the movement; he has potentially added a new dimension to the movement...
Levi was a professional chemist, manager of a paint factory in Turin until he retired at 58 to write, and so he writes from a scientific perspective and with a scientist's precision. But he was also a humanist, a lover of poetry, and these brief essays demonstrate the remarkable range of his interests, from children's games to the genius of Rabelais to the dissatisfactions of playing chess against a computer to the question of why butterflies are considered beautiful. And his mind is agile. When he discovers that the framework of a crinoline gown in the Kremlin museum...
...leader of the FBI team, Willem Dafoe (who played the martyred sergeant in Platoon and the humanist Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) is a stick of righteousness waiting to explode. But the movie also finds recesses where human dignity and compassion wait to be summoned. It is alert to the shifting emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship, especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent that both J. Edgar Hoover...