Word: paradox
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...paradox that is the American way of life never ceases to amaze me. First you spend millions of dollars to find more and better ways to increase the productivity of the land, and then spend millions finding ways to get rid of the surplus and paying farmers not to plant anything. Now as a person involved with health, I am flabbergasted to learn that the nation that spends the most on research directed toward fighting disease, and that boasts one of the longest life expectancies in the world, should pay such little attention to the aged benefactors of that research...
...nothing more than the beginning of a blessed reduction into soulless, primordial atoms. He observes that power is customarily pursued for its own sake and dismisses idealism from political behavior. Wearily he views America as a violent, uncivilized land full of literal-minded people with no sense of paradox. Its writers are inferior to those of Europe, ditto its food, and its attitude toward taboos is infantile. On and on Vidal goes, repeating much of the same material he has so often used in magazine articles and on TV talk shows. Two Sisters is ingenious, and its prose...
...perennial borderline case, the polity may recognize the oppressed as full citizens, honestly, count their votes, and consistently defeat their candidates. Here is a stalemate. The activists have acquired competing obligations both to the system and the system's victims. A radical himself. Walzer is uncomfortable with the paradox he has presented. His discomfort expresses a denial that "imperfect justice should be endured as long as possible." In a burst of patriotic optimism, he argues that in a democracy the hypocrisy of the majority can be exposed...
...religious. Bergman, the minister's alienated son, alone can be considered holy. His fatalism has an undertow of sublimity. His films are chapters in a coherent-if desperate -philosophy: Worship God or deny him; rage if you will, love if you can. But feel. For in the universal paradox, what God cannot, man must...
...Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know...