Word: scoundrels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...decided to act. In his small studio he took out a sheet of his fine drawing paper, wrote: "I name Pierre Bonnard my sole legatee," and signed it with the name of Maria Boursin. But he was so inept a scoundrel that he dated the will on the day he wrote it-ten months after Marthe's death. When Bonnard himself died in 1947, the obvious fakery of the will threw everything into confusion. Bonnard's direct heirs found themselves challenged for a half share in the estate by four nieces of his wife Marthe. The works that...
...Today Mark Twain's often irreverent notions about God, Bible and his fellow men seem no more fearsome than a day in a college classroom. By the lights of modern determinist psychology, for instance, there is scarcely anything startling in this statement: "Sometimes a man is ... a born scoundrel-like Stanford White*-and upon him the world lavishes censure and dispraise; but he is only obeying the law of his nature. [The human race] did not invent itself, and it had nothing to do with the planning of its weak and foolish character...
...Moral Ambiguity. As Daniels sees it, the Prince of Carpetbaggers was part scoundrel and part scapegoat and, as such, an apt symbol of the moral ambiguity of the Reconstruction period. Author Daniels argues that U.S. folklore has too gullibly enshrined the popular Southern myth of the carpetbagger as a devilish Yankee loot-and-run artist. In fact, he was sometimes a champion of Negro rights, sometimes a businessman with venture capital to invest, sometimes a restless Northern war veteran with a yen to revisit the South. If the carpetbagger's hand was plunged in the public till...
Maritain's love affair with the U.S. is not an uncritical passion. He concludes that Americans are most anxious to be loved abroad, that they feel their lack of "roots" too desperately ("The worst scoundrel in Europe has roots"), that if success does not come at once, discouragement sets in. He believes that, influenced by a "popularized, anonymous positivistic philosophy," too many Americans are afraid to hold strong opinions. Maritain makes a profound observation about tolerance: "The man who says 'What is truth?', as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human...
...omelet." The makeup nicely underscored Boswell's own assertion: "I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody." The old tiger was even more eloquent. In a swipe at the crusty Scottish father of Boswell (Kenneth Haigh) he roared: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel!" After a round of bullying Oliver Goldsmith he purred: "Come, come, we offended one another with our contention. Let us not offend the company by our compliments...