Word: noblest
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...Christians (still more than 85% of the population, according to a recent survey) going to order their erotic lives by rules and their inevitable accompaniment, guilt? Are they going to order their erotic lives at all? Samuel Johnson once contrasted preachers who deplored intoxication because it "debases reason, the noblest faculty of man," with preachers who warned drinkers that "they may die in a fit of drunkenness." (Johnson preferred the preachers who did not mince words.) If America gets a generation of preachers who boost sex because it gets you close to God, how will that affect the number...
...COMMONLY noted paradox that war, perhaps the basest of human activities, seems to bring out the best and noblest human qualities: self-lessness, heroism, sacrifice and comradeship. In time of war, soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies. Civilians willingly endure hardships that they would never accept in peacetime. Even anti-war author Erich Maria Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front, praised the "great brotherhood...arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlorness of death...
...maddening side. A figure like Wilson loves putting everyone around him on hold while he boozes, wenches, arranges elaborate practical jokes and, in this case, pursues a childish obsession. He will not start his movie until he slaughters an elephant. And why must he assault one of nature's noblest creatures? Precisely because, as he says, it's a sin -- one large enough, as he sees it, to match his own inflated ideas about himself...
...part of a post-cold war reordering of national priorities, a broadening of the definition of national security is apt. But so is at least a passing doubt about extending a frame of mind that in the past has not always aroused the nation's noblest instincts -- as the derivative term security risk can chillingly remind those who were around in the late '40s and the '50s. Do we really want cold war-type anxieties and constitutional indelicacies to be applied in nonmilitary realms -- in the environmental area, for instance, where restraints might be far more intrusive than military protectiveness...
...taken all sorts of risks -- ideological, stylistic, careerist -- yet has never overindulged his own quirks and perversity, the besetting sin of creative risk takers. He avoids easy solutions of either the overdecorative or hyperlogical kind. Instead he seeks to create buildings that are sublime and humane, the riskiest -- and noblest -- challenge...