Word: pessimistically
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...when Mr. Bland had just returned from a 28 years residence in China, he stated the opinion that China would not become a republican people because of internal conditions in China. At that time the general opinion was that Mr. Bland was a pessimist in his views towards China and he was not taken too seriously...
...imbecilities of his "You Know Me Al" stories, highbrow critics discovered in him a painstaking artist with a phonographic ear for U. S. folk speech, in his enameled tales a gentle contempt for the people he wrote about. To the late William Bolitho he was "the greatest and sincerest pessimist American literature has yet produced." An owl-eyed, saturnine man, given to one-word epigrams, he was once asked for his list of the ten most beautiful English words. His list: gangrene, flit, scram, mange, wretch, smoot, guzzle, McNaboe, blute, crene...
...shallow scoff at the outpourings of these pessimists; the thoughtful are challenged to sober reflection. History, especially current history--witness Russia, and Central Europe for example--is weighted heavily in favor of the pessimist. What can education say in answer? Nothing with certainty, that is, nothing which the pessimist, can not overwhelm with contradictory evidence. The pessimist looks into the past and is fortified, the educator in the final analysis must rest his case on the future and the hope that history need not always repeat itself. Suppose then, that the pessimist convinces the world that he is right--what...
...Jeremiah (i.e. denunciatory pessimist) is Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, M.A., since 1930 Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Though he plays such cheerful games as tennis and hockey, Jeremiah Joad also sits long over the chessboard, writes ironical, sarcastic books. A typical Joadism: "Advertisements are ugly, partly because commercial men rarely have the sense to employ artists to design them, partly because artists, on the rare occasions when they are employed, have not the sense to design what the commercial men want." (The Babbitt Warren, p. 143; Harper...
...puts himself on a level with Voltaire. Christ and Mohammed; he is a hero and the God of the Old Testament is a bogey-villain. In spite of his destructive wit which many even nowadays call blasphemous. Iconoclast Shaw is a kindly soul; like the light-hearted pessimist, his good nature keeps breaking through. Choleric colonels might take their apoplectic death from reading The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, and the Cambridge (England) public library has barred it, but readers of good-will should find old Author Shaw on their side...