Word: purposeless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps the author should have explored more fully the implications of Schumpeter's definition of imperialism as an "objectless, irrational, violent disposition toward indefinite, purposeless expansion." What is implied here is the problematical contrast between absolutism's quest of glory and aggrandizement as an end in itself and the rationally oriented calculus of bourgeois capitalism. Such encomium of the profit motive strikes me as no more realistic than the Marxist interpretation of imperialism...
...They at any rate will know the truth, and perhaps it will make them free. Free from what? From imbeciles and morons who are allowed to reproduce their kind, and to subsist upon the labors of others, from psychopaths who lead the mentally inferior mass of civilized populations into purposeless wars and social revolutions, from the ever increasing numbers of biological and mental inferiors who are anti-social and criminalistic. If the generations to come can be emancipated from these worthless and deleterious elements, it will be a comparatively simple matter to perfect social and political institutions and to adjust...
...large, however, the new Yale plan rings true. The sum of human knowledge represents too large a sea upon which to set the unwary undergraduate adrift. Much criticism, often from. Yale undergraduates themselves, has been heard concerning a student's undirected, purposeless effort. Some integration, some degree of "genuine mastery of some one field", in President Angell's words, seems necessary in the modern world...
...Prize. But only the most loyal of her admirers were likely to struggle through the long, tedious, devout series of novels laid in the 20th Century (The Burning Bush, The Wild Orchid) that followed. Sigrid Undset's antique figures might come to violent ends, but her unprincipled and purposeless moderns never come to life...
...dramatic critic, was on the staff of London House and Garden when, in 1921, he published his first novel, Crome Yellow. The dominant note of that book, as of Antic Hay and Those Barren Leaves which followed it, was one of unamiable cynicism over the prevailing moods and purposeless behavior of post-War English intellectuals. In Huxley's characters purpose was always identified with hypocrisy, devotion to any ideal with ineffectuality or self-deception. Between long highbrow talks, usually on science or art, his characters suffered from boredom, made love or deliberately created trouble to avoid it, were about...