Word: skepticism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saint-Exupery was an odd mixture: public figure and recluse, mystic and skeptic, fighter and dreamer. He abandoned the Roman Catholicism of his childhood but not his religious yearnings. "It's strange that I can't believe, that I don't have faith. One loves God without hope: That would be ^ something that would suit me -- the monastery of Solesmes and Gregorian chant." He referred often to the monastic life, and seems to have thought seriously about taking up such an existence after the war. He did not get the chance. But his ad- mirers, knowing that the issues...
...letter asked whether Vienna, W. Va. (pop. 13,000), had any motorcycles, hospital beds, sewing machines, wheelchairs, buses or other equipment to spare. After Mayor William Owens finished reading it, he did what any skeptic would do: he tested the signature by running a wet finger over it. The name Jose Duarte smudged. Says Owens: "It was real." The solicitation was one of more than 100 that El Salvador's President Duarte, himself a former mayor (of San Salvador, the capital), has sent to American cities requesting assistance for his war-ravaged nation. Though many of the mayors contacted...
Even Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, a vehement skeptic about SDI, has called X- ray lasers "the one and only proposal that makes any sense." He cautions, however, that the obstacles to developing an actual weapon are "fantastic," and repeated last week his view that SDI threatens "a big new escalation" in the arms race. For good measure, he took a swipe at Edward Teller, his colleague from the World War II atom-bomb project who is now a promoter of Star Wars in general and X-ray lasers in particular. Teller, said Bethe, was the scientist "who brought...
...minor irritations. On the convention's first evening, he looked for moderates who dissented from the platform, but three people on his list were away from their seats, and a fourth declined to be openly critical, so he had to switch gears and interview a skeptic from the right, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. The next night Wallace's scheduled interview with Barbara Bush, the Vice President's wife, was truncated to two questions. But he had good luck as well: he had perhaps the clearest line to the convention's instant media celebrity, Susan Catania...
...complete outsider to both Atari and computers, at first seemed like another bizarre Warner decision. Morgan was an Easterner in a Californian's game, a traditionalist in a rootless industry, a believer in long-term growth in a market hooked on quick profit and instant gratification, a technological skeptic among scientific true believers. Morgan had run the Philip Morris tobacco-marketing division, whose products included such fast-rising brands as Virginia Slims and Merit, with an almost ostentatious lack of computers. He preferred writing meticulous longhand notes on legal pads to punching numbers into a machine...