Word: perilous
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...need leaders brave enough to practice astringency, telling people what they don't want to hear. But his example of a leader who was great because he was astringent - Winston Churchill - never won an election through astringency. Throughout the 1930s, when he was warning of the Nazi peril, he was almost uniformly rejected as a crank. He was not elected Prime Minister in 1940; rather, he was installed by a Parliament that deferred general elections until after the war. And when one was finally held, in 1945, the British people promptly voted Churchill out of office. We need not only...
...Kinsley names Winston Churchill as a leader who was great because he was astringent. But Churchill never won an election through astringency. In the 1930s, when he was warning of the Nazi peril, he was almost uniformly rejected as a crank. He was not elected Prime Minister in 1940; rather, he was installed by a Parliament that deferred elections until after the war. When one was finally held, in 1945, Churchill was voted out of office. We need not only great leaders but also a public great enough to accept their leadership. M.L. Cross, Stephenville, Texas...
Josef Joffe, Professor at Stanford, wrongfully insinuates in the article "Gloat at Your Peril" that the E.U. indulges in schadenfreude about the U.S. financial crisis [Oct. 20]. We all know what the global economy is about. Would anyone be stupid enough to ignore the fact that the entire human body suffers if just one organ gets sick? Helmar W. Kühn, FRANKFURT, GERMANY...
...search for equity between the competing claims of individuals - the sort that might be made by a Palestinian farmer, for example, who has seen water from the local aquifer appropriated by an Israeli settlement. We ignore such claims, and the sullen outrage that accompanies them, at our peril. But there is a second sense in which people make a claim of justice, and this is as a collective - asking that a group to which they belong should receive their just deserts of respect, dignity and influence...
...when she emerged as a self-possessed little scene-stealer in Sean Penn's I Am Sam, and continued to impress in Sweet Home Alabama, Man on Fire and the Spielberg War of the Worlds. Other kid actors might be imps and scamps, but Fanning located the gravity and peril in childhood. Now she is negotiating early adolescence with the same poise. She recently survived the indie movie Hounddog, a heaping plate of refried Southern Gothic (known at Sundance as "the Dakota Fanning rape movie") in which she plays another backwoods unfortunate who says in the first scene...