Word: power
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With a histrionic flair for the crude, sardonic image, Wallace lampoons all of "them," assuring his listeners that they themselves are just as smart as the people in positions of power. The bureaucrats who enforce school-desegregation guidelines "don't have enough sense to know how to get out of bed in the morning, so they have to write a guideline for us." Intellectuals are "overeducated, ivory-tower folk," or "pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle straight." He says: "Any truck driver'd know right off what to do at the scene of an accident...
There is, in fact, nothing else for George but politics and the pursuit of power. Food has no interest for him: he will eat anything, so long as it is smothered in ketchup. He is never without a cigar, but he cannot say what brand he is smoking at any given moment. He does not drink: alcohol, he says, "wastes your physical and mental energy." His dress is nondescript: always a white shirt and a faintly iridescent black suit. He has no hobbies and no interest in material possessions (he claims assets of $77,000). Aboard his campaign plane...
...private Wallace seems virtually emotionless. Always busy, he spends little time with his four children (Bobbi Jo, 23; Peggy, 18; George, 16; and Lee, 7); his late wife, Lurleen, reportedly once nearly divorced him as a consequence of his neglect. Yet in his anxiety to maintain a power base for his presidential bid, he did not hesitate to run her for Governor in 1966 (she died of cancer last...
...federal government. Virtually everyone is paralyzed by the desire to retain influence and effectiveness; and for many this activity becomes a consuming need, far more important than sorting out rights and wrongs. No one is willing to commit himself morally because that might short-circuit his links with the power center in Washington. It is difficult to decide whether these people are prevented from taking dissident stands by the lures of government funds and being "where it's at," or whether they don't have the minimum moral outrage to even want to dissent. In any event the result...
Furthermore, it is important at this point to be blunt and honest about what we mean by "reason" and pragmatism. If your definition of them somehow extends a blanket approval to current status-quo foreign policy, to the "responsibility of power," and to anti-communist assumptions, then we are not talking about the same animal. For me, reason and rationality are useful intellectual tools for uncovering the truth and for thinking effectively. Reason has never been for me an end-all, be-all sort of thing: when rationality and pragmatism gain too iron a hold over my life, then...