Word: optimist
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This combination of Helen's bright side and Annie's dark--of pupil and teacher, optimist and pessimist--makes Lash's study fascinating. "One approached the world with a chip on her shoulder and assumed everyone was ready to knock it off; the other reached out to the world with a heart filled with love and kindness and assumed the world would reciprocate. It was the difference between the manners of Tewksbury and Tuscumbia." Without Annie--or when an outside force, such as John Macy intervened--Helen was at a loss. Without Helen, Annie was angry, vindictive...
...meet Freeman Dyson as a nine-year-old child poring over--not Einstein's differential equations--but Edith Nesbit's utopia. This introduction is true to character. Dyson is not just a physicist; he's a romantic, a humanist and an optimist...
...surprises of the first week confirm that once again pre-season outlooks mean little. One die-hard Harvard optimist said jokingly after yesterday's win, "Dartmouth and Brown both lost, so we have the Ivy title clinched...
...qualify their presidential candidates. The freewheeling and occasionally violent campaign that followed persuaded some Nigerians that the experiment with democracy was premature. Said a professor: "There are two kinds of people here, the pessimist who says civilian rule will fall apart before it begins in October, and the optimist who says that it will fall apart six months later...
That is the second riddle about Thomas and his philosophy. He bears no resemblance to the fatuous Dr. Pangloss, who chirped about this best world while stumbling through a series of catastrophes. Voltaire's doctor was an a priori optimist, and nothing that he saw or experienced could rattle his foolhardy faith. Thomas reverses this procedure and writes about things he has observed, grounding his conclusions in the tiniest material details that the world can provide. Because he has peered at nature's building blocks more closely than anyone but fellow biologists, and because he can translate...