Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Born at Florence in 1469 at the apogee of Florentine glory under Lorenzo de Medici ("The Magnificent"), Niccolo Machiavelli remains the most celebrated commentator on the brilliant and ruthless statesmanship of the Borgia, Sforza and Medici. When the Prince was translated into English many an Anglo-Saxon was appalled that so many truths about the baseness of men and how to play upon it should ever have been set down in type. Machiavelli was suspected by simple souls of having been the devil himself, and the adjective "Machiavellian" was introduced into English with the connotation "diabolic." Machiavellian maxims...
Fascists snapped to attention last week, carried out curt orders in haste. Il Duce's logical and ruthless spirit was astir. Before the week was out he haded has "an Augustan conception of grandeur." 3) Decreed, to the discomfiture of Fascismo's capitalist well-wishers, that every merchant in Italy must display both the wholesale and retail price of his goods, and must throw open his books to the Government, which will permit him to make no more than what it considers a fair profit. 4) Inaugurated a tax on bachelors, the proceeds of which will be devoted...
...soldiers of the Manchurian Super-Tuchun Chang Tso-lin, now in control of Peking, notoriously follow his example of ruthless and inhuman cruelty upon slight provocation. Last week one of Chang's lieutenants demanded a "contribution" from a Chinese merchant resident in the suburbs of Peking. The merchant refused. The soldiers brought a cauldron of oil, built a fire beneath it, seized and stripped one of the merchant's daughters, boiled her to death...
...laughs that the lines themselves never even hinted at, while Daughter's unspoiled charm is one of Broadway's fresh delights. The dull book goes on at length concerning a simple maid who is about to be begged, borrowed, or stolen from her French Academy shelter by ruthless wooers, when Stone, the elder, swoops along in an airplane, hanging by his heels, and flips the lass into a heavier-than-air-haven. Loud applause-for sweet Dorothy, her still agile ancestor, and Mr. Dillingham's sumptuous effects...
...Testament account of the crucifixion. In Walter Hampden, innately a scholar and a gentleman, it is difficult to see a tigerish outlaw of harsh Jerusalem. Yet there he is, leaping to good, plunging into evil, denying the gods, always thinking of them, a strange duality of ruthless passion and grand sacrifice. He breaks a fellow thief's legs, cuts off the hand of another, supposedly traitorous. To atone for his cruelty, he sacrifices himself to save a girl, unloved, who adores him. Salvation comes at the end in a fiercely realistic crucifixion tableau. It is all deeply sincere, beautifully...