Word: materialist
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Revolt Against Pomposity. In the view of his followers, Mort Sahl represents a new and growing feeling, described rather breathlessly by Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "a mounting restlessness and discontent, an impatience with clichés and platitudes, a resentment against the materialist notion that affluence is the answer to everything, a contempt for banality and corn-in short, a revolt against pomposity. Sahl's popularity is a sign of a yearning for youth, irreverence, trenchancy, satire, a clean break with the past...
...middle-aged American who is fighting, says Alfred Kazin, "not for freedom from convention, as George Apley did, but for conventions-standards of belief and behavior-that will allow him to function as a human being in a world where beliefs are shared.1' He is troubled by the materialist itch of American life, whether he is Charley Gray, the nice poor boy who wants to be a nice rich man but still plays by the rules, or Willis Wayde, who has torn up the rules and claws his way to uneasy success-the only Marquand hero the author seems...
...effort to separate the Tibetan people from their Buddhist religion. In pursuit of this policy, the Chinese have ruthlessly "killed religious figures, because their religious belief and practice was an encouragement and example to others. They also have forcibly transferred large numbers of Tibetan children to a Chinese materialist environment in order to prevent them from having a religious upbringing." The Dalai Lama told the commissioners that his information showed that more than 10,000 Tibetan children, some as young as age six, had been torn away from their parents, given numbers and sent to China...
That important and frankly materialist hope shaped an era. The Lewis Eliot saga, for all its limitations, reflects the triumphs of the era, as well as its dangers and its crises of the soul...
...faith and honest doubt sometimes trembled under him. He became bad-tempered every time his devoted Australian wife took another of his brood off to be baptized, but toward the end of his life took great stock in the Old Testament. He was no scientific bigot and mocked his materialist friend John Tyndall by asking how he could deduce Hamlet from the molecular structure of a mutton chop. He dismissed August Comte's fashionable positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity...