Word: idealists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...idealism. His amphibious forays into Latin America were designed, he said, to foster "constitutional liberty." And his rationale for bringing the U.S. into World War I was that "the world must be made safe for democracy." Criticized for being too Wilsonian, he replied, "Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I'm an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world...
Jefferson the idealist won the hearts of journalists forever by declaring that he "should not hesitate for the moment" to defend right of newspapers over the right of government...
...Lower East Side. His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little of either. From that frustration was born his thesis: if discipline, willpower and the force of reason couldn't hook students, maybe freedom and responsibility...
...moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist state fell away in November 1989, it made some giddy, noble sense to install Havel as the first President of Czechoslovakia...
...recent stroyline about art and whether it should by produced for its sales value or for its own sake was quite entertaining. Hobbes, the idealist made a lovely clay tiger. Calvin the cynic, took his play-doh and produced a hundred shrunken heads of popular cartoon characters" and "stitched their mouths shut." Sick, but funny...