Word: ruthlessness
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...father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Beaufort West, a country town miles from South Africa's big cities. Father comes across as a charmingly inept eccentric who understood God but could never master a car's gearshift. Mother, though, was a ruthless perfectionist who taught her four children that they must always be first in school and never admit defeat...
...American city is commonly portrayed as hovering on the brink of decay and disaster. Is this picture overdrawn? Indeed it is, according to a recently published book, The Unheavenly City, that has found favor with the Nixon Administration and has aroused considerable controversy among academicians. Combining a ruthless logic of argument with an engaging tolerance of tone, Edward Banfield, 53, professor of urban government at Harvard, contends that many urban problems are largely imaginary. In fact, says Banfield, the cities are performing better than ever...
Stravinsky's music is characterized by clarity, precision, ruthless concision, wild energy, and gaiety-Eliot's magical condition of complete simplicity. His musical sentences are always composed of complete units, which is why he manipulates prosody by syllable rather than word. He abhors sostenuto music, prefers staccato, the breaks of breath, which render every particle of every line crystalline. He does not admit superfluous notes, dynamic nourishes, believing that "gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches." He is most traditional, and most original, in his use of severely-delineated polyphony, rhythm, text, and articulation. Stravinsky has always...
Throughout history, dissent has been more effectively expressed by the word than by the weapon. The French Revolution was betrayed by the ruthless masters of the Terror THOMAS PAINE who silenced all opposition with the guillotine. The enduring importance of the revolution lies, rather, in the principles enunciated on its behalf by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who bequeathed the notion of human equality to the modern world. During its bleakest hours, the American Revolution was resuscitated not so much by brilliant military strategy as by brilliant words-those of Tom Paine in the "times that...
...might be expected for so ruthless a condensation, the final product doesn't contain everything it might. The book's subtitle-"A documentary of courtroom confrontation"-gives a good idea of what's maide Faced with the choice of writing a legal gloss on the trial or piccing together a Whitman's Sampler of courtroom witticisms, the editors have steered loward the sampler. Their purpose, achieved with spectacular success, is to show off the escalating battle between Judge Hoffman and the Conspiracy...