Word: selfishness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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John Wilmot was one of the most clever Court poets during the reign of Charles II, and in many ways he represents the very nature of the Restoration: he was lewd, selfish, disdainful and he had no sense whatsoever of right and wrong. In that era Hobbes made it fashionable to have a rational disregard for religion, the only binding force for an otherwise criminal aristocracy. Any power Parliament had gained during Cromwell's Commonwealth dissipated with the return of Charles II, for whom Rochester saved some of the most vicious barbs--as in this epitaph...
Miner's rights are no longer a matter of managerial largesse; the union now has the economic power to force the companies to share their bloated coal profits with the miners. The longterm economic stagnation suffered by the coal industry has left the mining companies with selfish and antiquated goals. A departure from this mentality of greed will enable the coal companies to imitate the U.M.W.'s advancement from its own archaic past...
...loosen up a stodgy and henpecked banker (Roland Young, well-cast). We are supposed to sympathize with the decadent ones and think that they've found the only way to live: the only trouble is that their idea of living is more than having harmless drunken fun--they're selfish and cruel and irresponsible throughout. This is a thirties high society movie that you just can't pardon. It isn't even very witty. With Billie Burke, the Good Witch in Oz, as Youngs's puritanical wife. Hal Roach produced this in 1937; directed by Norman Macleod...
Your article on the falling birth rate [Sept. 9] stressed the selfish reasons (not wanting to give up careers, free time, money), while ignoring a very real reason that many young couples are remaining childless. They are taking a good look at what type of person can be a good parent...
...good mother or father, that parenthood like any other career is not something that everyone can do well, and that persons who are not suited to being parents can damage or destroy a child if they go ahead and have a baby. This attitude shows self-sacrifice rather than selfishness. People who blithely have children and then ignore them or handle them ineptly-these are the selfish ones...