Word: morality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...done and gradually comes apart. The other (John Dall) is almost hard enough to carry them both. He is particularly excited by the presence of the teacher, a sort of armchair nihilist who first infected the boys' minds with the idea that there are superior men, above all moral law. Dall really wants to lay the corpse at his master's feet, the way a cat brings in a slaughtered robin. When he finally does, he finds that the teacher's endorsement of murder was always purely academic...
...edge would be blunted. The boys in the play-who were pretty clearly derived from the Loeb-Leopold case-were highly cultivated, effeminate esthetes. So was their teacher. Much of the play's deadly excitement dwelt in this juxtaposition of callow brilliance and lavender dandyism with moral idiocy and brutal horror. Much of its intensity came from the shocking change in the teacher, once he learned what was going on. In the movie, the boys and their teacher are shrewdly plausible but much more conventional types. Even so, the basic idea is so good and in its diluted...
...women seem so real, and lets them speak for themselves at such length, that the reader has but one desire: to get away from them. By ruthlessly eliminating any suggestion of decency or honor in her money-crazed and lecherous characters, Miss Stead deprives herself of all possibilities for moral contrasts and dramatic conflicts; the total absence of white makes it impossible to recognize the black in the dark. The novel soon assumes the quality of a very shrill feminine nightmare...
...leading character is Robert Grant, who is fiftyish, roly-poly, and "a moral leper." Grant spends his life chasing women and dollars with obsessive passion; he is not a hypocrite, since he lacks the degree of self-awareness necessary for hypocrisy; he is simply an ugly tub of flesh who snatches and grabs, whimpers and bellows, cringes and brutalizes as his pleasures demand, without ever feeling the slightest genuine regard for anyone. He invites women to his room for "a little tea, a little chat," tells them that "a woman like you could keep a man. I'm looking...
...aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve . . . We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow . . . Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians...