Word: mania
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...finals, generals--, it is only the powerfully-willed student who will choose the former to the detriment of the latter. That a few of these students do appear is a testimony to themselves, but not to Harvard's curricula. The lure of grades, however, is not so much a mania for the marks themselves--at least, we hope not--but rather a desire for what grades ideally should provide: an evaluation of the extent to which a student has mastered, or failed to master, an area of knowledge. If the grade system, which is now under attack from several quarters...
...Deputies (where he served 1924-32, 1936-39, 1946-55), during the next decade became notorious as a party hatchetman. He helped organize (1936) the International Brigade, won dubious recognition for his Spanish Civil War exploits from Novelist Ernest Hemingway: "He is crazy as a bedbug. He has a mania for shooting people...
...After the war Stalin became even more capricious, irritable and brutal; in particular, his suspicion grew. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions . . . This un believable suspicion was cleverly taken advantage of by the abject provocateur and vile enemy Beria, who had murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people . . . The question arises . . . Why did we not do something earlier, during Stalin's life, in order to prevent the loss of innocent lives? It was because Stalin personally supervised [the purges], and the majority of the Politburo members did not at the time know all of the circumstances . . . and could...
...small, exquisitely molded bas-relief plaquettes often worn as neck pendants. In pursuit of perfection until his death in 1914, Dreyfus sometimes owned as many as five or six versions of the same medal in succession, settling only for the most flawless. The result of this mania was the collection of 1,306 bronzes (see opposite), that were newly installed this week in Washington's National Gallery as part of the gallery's 15th anniversary celebration...
Tillich went on to say that pre-war Germans lost the criterion and the meaning of the church, and emphasized this as one of the main causes of the Fascist mania. "In America, we still have such criteria," said Tillich, "and this is why such potentially Fascist movements as McCarthy's can never succeed...