Word: realist
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Prophecy was not one of Maugham's interests. He was an unblinking realist, a doctor who narrowed his vision to examine the frailer aspects of human nature. He fortified himself against fickleness and changing fashions with wealth, influential acquaintances and property; he veiled his own nature, lied to biographers and journalists, manipulated friends and paid for affection. His long career now seems part of geology, with its upthrusts, weatherings and glaciations...
...mess, all the frictions and bad smells generated by social change and people exercising their constitutional rights. Jefferson had an idea that democracy should be genteel, but it did not work out that way. And today, there is no point in growing as mistily sentimental as a Soviet realist hack about the pleasures of right thinking and conformity...
...White House!" With his staccato delivery, Bush galvanized the delegates as he ticked off the jobs he had held, including head of the CIA, and declared, "It's time we got off the back of the CIA and the FBI." He described himself as a realist. "I see the world as it really is," he declared. "And it's tough out there...
Author John Barth, 49, began his career in the guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction...
Castro is less optimistic about the ability of any revolution to create a "new socialist man." He is also more of a realist. Publicly he has acknowledged the difficulty involved in supplanting old attitudes, which he calls "hangovers form the capitalist value system." Even though the revolution has managed to change the foundation of society from one of competition to cooperation, stealing from the government at the expense of fellow workers persists...