Word: skeptical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Wallach calls Montaigne 'the great skeptic.' A skeptic of any kind is bad enough. A great skeptic is the last person I would go to on a question of such great importance-my eternal salvation...
...them by his example that virtue doesn't pay." His targets ranged from the ancient Greeks ("Greek tragedy, that unparalleled bore, is confined almost wholly to actresses who have grown too fat for Ibsen") to chiropractors ("heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover"). Since he was "a skeptic as to all ideas, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed...
...gone far on his journey before he realized what his fate would be: he was a "stray dog" among philosophers, doomed to bite at many theories, but never to find one that answered all his questions. And so, he wrote, "I resigned myself to a position of skepticism towards all philosophical systems and system-builders." He refused to be one of the men & women who try to "remake God and the universe in their own images." His own plea to philosophers: "Why assume that where two philosophies differ one must be wrong? Two pictures of the same object taken from...
Budapest-born (1905) Arthur Koestler, one of the best political-novelists of the last decade (Darkness at Noon), is also a stubborn, highly independent thinker-a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book he stabs at a more ambitious project-"an inclusive theory...
Miss Li & Miss Liu. Loudspeaker trucks blared through the streets of Nanking and other large cities. Walls were pasted with purple and yellow posters proclaiming the virtues of candidates; across one a skeptic had scrawled "tsui niu" (bull-thrower). "Ward and block bosses," commented Nanking's Hsin Min Pao, "go to so many feasts they have stomachaches every day." But this time the Kuomintang made good its promise that seats guaranteed to minor parties should indeed go to minor parties. To teach party discipline on other matters, Kuomintang leaders cracked the whip...