Word: moralist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sociologist as moralist peaked in the late '40s and '50s. Americans who had endured the pangs of the Depression and wartime rationing enjoyed an unprecedented feast of goods and services. Focusing on the problems of affluence more than on its benefits, Scholars David Riesman, Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer published The Lonely Crowd. More lightly credentialed observers got into the act. Books such as The Organization Man, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Status Seekers became bestsellers to a "we" generation confused about keeping up with the Joneses...
...they're wrong: he is a working American moralist. He hates the cheap and the shoddy; the bad values, the bad art, the bad people. His hero, Travis McGee, who hates all of it for him, hates with intelligence, an acuity, and a ruthless...
Bradbury's spare, economical style reveals the consummate storyteller. But it conceals the moralist. Other science-fiction writers may celebrate technology; Bradbury warns readers to be wary of it. Other fantasists may admire power or cunning; Bradbury saves his praise for the fragile fabric of civilization, and extols the basic virtues of common sense and human affection...
...austere public moralist was capable of some extremely fallible private behavior, and his biographer does not back away from such lapses. Lippmann urged President Wilson to begin military conscription, then worked hard to make sure that he would not have to serve himself. "What I want to do is to devote all my time to studying and speculating," he wrote a friend in the office of the Secretary of War. He also appealed for exemption on the ground that "my father is dying"; Jacob Lippmann. a clothing manufacturer, lived ten years longer. In his 40s Lippmann had an affair with...
Nobody used a subjective camera like Hitchcock, and no one could turn the camera back on us with so much contempt. Hitchcock was a moralist who said, "You like this, don't you?" The biggest joke in Hitchcock's films is that we're all guilty of something, call it "original sin"--we are at very least voyeurs. We all have a Bruno or Norman Bates in us and sooner or later someone's going to find out. Hitchcock's films were ridden with symbols--staircases, mothers, skinny blondes, birds, windows; it was a code that viewers happily followed from...