Word: moralistes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...appalled as never before by reality itself. Using the gaudiest of theater tricks-florid language, Hellzapoppin explosions, surrealist juxtapositions-he has shattered the familiar outer shell of life to reveal decadence and rottenness within. But in doing so, he has partly succumbed as a writer to what as a moralist he would expose...
Author Halsey's arguments are often narrow and sometimes absurd. She writes, in fact, as if the split between God and Mammon had not plagued man from the beginning. Nonetheless, her book is the work of an earnest armchair moralist with an honored American tradition behind her. If, as is very likely, The Folks at Home puts Author Halsey back into the moneymaking nightmare, it will be because she has laid a tremulous but honest finger on a national nerve...
...spite of his classical learning, which he still pursues with delight, he lards his speech with outmoded slang and zealously drops the g's of his present participles. He is a jester, a moralist, a preacher and-even off the bench-a judge. Socially he is unpredictable. A tall story, for example, may find him just politely receptive, with a sideways turn of the head, a half-attentive smile, and a "Well, you don't say." Or it may immediately detonate an incredulous guffaw, ending with a murmured "Well, by golly! Can you beat that...
...this argument the lawyer-moralist has a stern retort. First of all, punishment is an administrative necessity-an indispensable safeguard of civilized society. More important, "to condemn and punish offenders, to insist on their responsibility ... is a phase of ... bracing strictness which has an irreplaceable educational value . . . With any individual, simply to accept his temperament and character as they are, and his impulses as they come, is death to moral progress . . . It is also disastrous to lead [a delinquent] to believe that he is more sinned against than sinning and to imply that strenuous moral effort on his own part...
Merit & Demerit. Is the lawyer-moralist wholly right? According to Sir Walter, he is in many ways as wrong as the psychologist. At their worst, courtroom judgments are nonmoral, stressing too much the deed and too little the doer, treating the offender simply as a nuisance that must be removed. At their best, they are sub-Christian. "They witness to a moral order which commands a deep respect. But [they miss] the supreme heights of human experience . . . for [they leave] room for no gospel and no salvation...