Word: humbugs
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...book makes clear that Lloyd George, besides being a great man, also lived up to the English legend-that the Welsh are lechers and Bible bashers, musicians and bards, and, from Henry Tudor to Aneurin Bevan, have had a capacity for stirring up trouble. Lloyd George was a humbug ("a Bible-thumping pagan," is his son's phrase), something very close to a crook (the question of a political fund, most of which may have stuck in his own pocket, was never cleared up), and a sedulous seducer on a scale "unprecedented" in the history of British statesmanship...
Most analysts (959 of them in the American Association, with even more in training) have flatly and publicly denied all such charges. But whatever they preach, they have modified their practice as they have seen basic analytic principles, stripped of the ritualistic humbug, put to good use in general psychiatry, especially in brief psychotherapy and in group therapy. While last week's conventioneers droned through discussions of such topics as the "denial of envy of the phallus of God," one of the most scholarly of U.S. analysts gave a corridor summation: "When the analysts get up at conventions like...
...father insists on writing a school essay for his son. The teacher openly ridicules the effort as a piece of rhetorical bombast, gives the boy the lowest mark in the class. On tenterhooks, the proud father asks his son the grade. Tempted to deflate the stuffy old humbug, the boy lies instead and tells him that he tied for the highest mark. With subtle and touching sensitivity, Aymé indicates that the boy has taken the first important step toward manhood -to forgive one's father...
...Humbug-hating John Birch was more proud of the U.S. 14th Air Force in which he rose to captain than the whole Navy, and your promotion of him to navy captain he would have spurned. Likewise would he have spurned the use of his great and good name for such a cause as Leader Welch's. On his headstone near Hsuchow, the Chinese wrote his epitaph: "Sha sheng ch'eng jen," which can be translated "He died for humanity," or "He died for righteousness." Leader Welch is doing dishonor to the name of my old friend, who fought...
Were the ancient Romans men of austere probity, superior soldiers, masters of government? Is Rome a temple of the classic spirit? Was the Renaissance Italy's finest hour? Humbug, all humbug, says Menen in effect. As he sees it, ancient Rome's writers and pseudo sages produced a kind of corporate image of what the Romans wanted to be like, and subsequent historians have simply perpetuated it. Then as now, he implies, la dolce vita, the sweet life of lavish and cynical corruption, was close to the heart of Roman reality...