Word: pessimists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time Congress was disillusioned about the farmer. In early youth I learned a piano piece called The Happy Farmer. Where the composer picked up such a weird inspiration, I can't imagine. The farmer is hardworking, honest, pays his debts. But he is a congenital pessimist, finds conditions always bad, and blames everything on the Government-including rainfall...
Having been a maverick philosopher who strayed into law, Holmes increasingly became a maverick justice who strayed into philosophy. His skepticism ("The skeptic cannot be a pessimist") brought him into conflict with the uncritical optimism of those liberals and progressives who claimed him for their own. Said he: "I believe that the wholesale social regeneration which so many now seem to expect . . . cannot be affected appreciably by tinkering with the institution of property, but only by taking in hand life. . . . The notion that with socialized property we should have women free and a piano for everybody seems...
...Even in the last war, Marshal Petain was a great pessimist," stated William Hermanns, in a Current Events talk at New Lecture Hall yesterday afternoon. To illustrate his point, Hermanns read passages from books by Clemenceau and Foch which showed that Petain lacked self-confidence...
...pessimist is Bishop Rowe. "Why it's a picnic, that's what it is, a picnic, compared to the way I used to cover Alaska," said he cheerily last week. Nor is he a backward looker. "The church is more alive and alert today," he observes. "There is an enthusiasm today that did not exist before. . . . The church has a larger world vision...
William Saroyan can raise the same kind of stirring laugh that Chekhov could. Sample: Jim Dandy's henchman reads him a sales letter from one ex-Jockey Earl Catfoot ("Why should you go without? Go with. . . . Don't be a sucker-be a winner."). The pessimist comments: "It wouldn't help." Says Jim Dandy, controlling his temper: "You may be mistaken. Weighing one hundred pounds, the man has ridden horses...