Word: puckishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...without God. "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," goes one of Voltaire's best-known epigrams. Less well-known is his balancing phrase, "but all nature cries out to us that he does exist." Nothing summed up Voltaire's puckish, often contradictory private honesty more than an incident in his 80th year. Overwhelmed by the beauty of a hilltop sunset, he knelt and cried, "O Mighty God, I believe!" However, as he got to his feet he had second thoughts: "As to Monsieur the Son and Madame his mother, that is another...
...motives in politics is always a highly popular but exceedingly tricky business. And discovering the motivation underlying the meanderings of the shaggy Senator is unusually difficult. Dirksen, always theatrical, would give reporters no explanation for his decision, "Why I did it because I wanted to," he said with almost puckish glee...
...Fairmont Hotel's Room 75 overlooking San Francisco Bay, its waters ashimmer in the morning sunlight. A young woman picked up the phone, announced: "Salinger for Senator." In the roomful of newsmen and politicians, no one flinched more at the strangeness of those unlikely words than puckish Pierre Salinger, 39, who less than 24 hours before had been happily padding about the White House in his job as presidential press secretary...
Giving an outdoor performance in Washington, D.C., puckish Pianist Victor Borge, 54, became the first Danish-born Connecticut resident ever to play a piano on the steps of the Capitol. "It's nice to hear some harmony on Capitol Hill," quipped Borge to an audience sprinkled with Senators and Representatives. "I was in the Far East spreading good will. Then I read the news in the papers, and thought I'd better come home." The show was arranged by Connecticut's Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who hoped it would help sell Congress on his pending bill...
...English drama cannot meet. The Miser, by Molière, the Guthne troupe's second offering, almost visibly chased away the lingering ghost of a sad Hamlet. Director Douglas Campbell has made a stylized harlequinade of Molière's comedy of avarice, with curtsying dances and puckish pratfalls, Halloween masks and wopsical hats. It is more a costume ball than a play, and it stresses what is sheen-deep in Molière's wit rather than what is skinflinty. Still, in a glancing way, the master French comic moralist's point does get made...