Word: puritanism
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...thinks free enterprise is no more valid as a foundation for an economy than the notion that, in a free marketplace of ideas, the best ideas will necessarily prevail. No conventional conservative could have written his account of Spiro Agnew, in whom he feels, "America's old dimmed-puritan mixture still works-morals without religion, a peremptory must without a tempering why (inverse of the European formula, religion without morals). Agnew maintains the cult of success as a form of righteousness. America's history revolves around the interconnected superstitions that one must deserve success; that one can (rather...
...detective's standards: "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down." Adopting a godlike motto ("We Never Sleep") the Pinkertons did not so much solve cases as play Puritan avenging angels in private duels with the devil...
Practically everybody, whether doctor or layman, pothead or puritan, has been expressing dogmatic opinions for years about the effects of marijuana on its users. It therefore came as a surprise last week when a team of Harvard and Boston University investigators reported that they had just conducted the first truly scientific tests ever made on the subject. Their findings, which appear in Science magazine, confirm some popular ideas about marijuana's effects and expose others as completely false. The drug, the investigators concluded, "appears to be a relatively mild intoxicant, with minor, real, shortlived effects." It seems to have...
...written Oliver Twist to rip the brocade from Puritan England and reveal the human misery beneath. To those who found his melodrama too coarse, Dickens replied: "Criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise ... It is wonderful," he continued, "how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance...
...life, when he was dying of TB, he characteristically decided to treat it on a fog-swept island off Scotland's west coast. Evelyn Waugh visited him on his deathbed, and the reactionary Catholic gourmet saw a rare quality in the socialist agnostic puritan. To Cyril Connolly, Waugh solemnly said: "He is very near to God." Told of this, Orwell sniffed: "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions...