Word: instrument
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Blunt Instrument...
...article about assassination as an instrument of diplomacy does not mention Utopia by Thomas More (1516). The people of that perfect community are described as pacifists who detest war but recognize that sometimes it is unavoidable and therefore try to achieve its aims with the least loss of human life. So "as soon as war is declared, they promise great rewards to anyone who will kill the enemy's king, and smaller (but still very great) rewards for killing those whom they regard as most responsible after the king for plotting aggression against them . . . Though this manner of waging...
...trouble is the decline of our belief in reason as an instrument. Increasingly, we have substituted emotion for reason. Psychology has told us that seemingly rational arguments are determined by hidden and irrational forces inside ourselves, difficult if not impossible to reach. Positivist philosophy has told us that ethics is merely a game of words and that moral judgments are only opinions. In an odd and coincidental alliance, pop culture and recent radical theory gave us a kind of debased romanticism, glorifying feeling over thought, will or desire over reflection, violence over politics, and instant satisfaction over anything else...
...AUTHORITARIANISM. Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. To attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humour, and to confirm them in an opposition which more gentle usage might easily induce them . . . to lay aside...
Doctorow's mother was a pianist and his father owned a record and musical-instrument store in Manhattan's Hippodrome Theater building-components of Ragtime's vanished New York. After graduating from the select Bronx High School of Science, he studied literature at Kenyon College in Ohio. It was the kind of education that sharpened his critical faculties at the expense of his creative talents. "I had to purge myself of the sense of the writer as an intellect," he recalls. The purge has worked. Ragtime is free of the self-consciousness of form that mars most...