Word: precept
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...gang. The parable--one of many bits of wisdom the leader of the largest street gang in the U.S. was fond of imparting to his followers--implied that a duck is safe so long as it doesn't open its mouth and start making noise. It was a sound precept. And one that "the Chairman," as he is known, no doubt reflected upon during the eight weeks he spent in a Chicago federal courtroom watching the jury listen to secretly recorded conversations through which he ran his drug empire from an Illinois state prison...
...suicide; I believe it was the convergence of two factors: the medical disorder of depression and an extraordinary sense of honor. Severe clinical depression is a fairly common occurrence in Washington. As tragic as is the loss of Admiral Boorda--a man of proven courage and high moral precept--it will be compounded if we don't think hard about how to lower the likelihood of more such calamities...
...provided some entertainment for the winter-weary. Newspapers printed excerpts from Collins' spurned fiction ("'Don't call me your little cabbage,' she said savagely. 'I'm nobody's cabbage.'"), along with careful descriptions of her clothing. While grilling Evans, the actress's lawyer harked back, perhaps unintentionally, to a precept set forth in Aristotle's Poetics: "She turned in--however good, however bad--a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end, a completed manuscript?" After a pause, Evans said...
...legal codes and systems of morality there is such a thing as justifiable homicide. It might be helpful to look at the case from a perspective other than the orthodox Christian one-a Buddhist viewpoint, let's say. Two great Buddhist principles collide here: reverence for life vs. the precept that the purpose of a human life should be to reduce suffering; any act that increases the total of human suffering is immoral, and any act that reduces suffering is moral. By those criteria, some births-those that result from incest or rape, or threaten the mother's life-would...
From a film industry that softens virtually any contentious social issue -- aids, the Holocaust, Vietnam -- into a fable with a happy ending, Forrest is the ultimate sentimental figure. He embodies that noble Hollywood precept, the spiritual superiority of the handicapped. Forrest is not the ranter on the subway or the sullen, overgrown lad at the back of the class. He is -- well, just...