Word: squalidity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...France's first great experiment in open admissions education, the "University of Paris VIII," better known as Vincennes because it is housed in the former royal hunting forest at the eastern end of the Paris Metro line. Even when Vincennes opened in 1970, the campus was Sixties Squalid. Today the school is an ill-repaired set of buildings and classrooms with barely a wall not defaced by leftist posters or spray-painted slogans: SHAH ASSASSIN! I HATE COPS. SOLIDARITY WITH NICARAGUA...
...political science professor could identify. The thing normally cannot be seen or heard. It is not easily documentable with dates and places and simple sentences. It is a shadow that has followed Bush throughout his national prominence. It showed up again in the New Hampshire campaign, and in the squalid Nashua argument over who should or should not debate. That helped trigger some of the electoral doubts that engulfed Bush in the primary...
...self-control, selfdiscipline, stoicism, decorum, even inhibition and a little puritanism. It may be time for a touch of reticence. Coercion cannot produce such attitudes, but the mood of the time may. Americans may find themselves agreeing in some paraphrase of Elihu Root when he walked through a squalid Siberian village as Woodrow Wilson's emissary in the first Soviet revolutionary dawn. "I'm a firm his in democracy," he said, as he skeptically eyed his surroundings. "But I do not like filth...
...then, someone's shovel blade would strike an unexploded bomb; mostly the air in the '70s was thick with a sense of aftermath, of public passions spent and consciences bewildered. The American gaze turned inward. It distracted itself with diversions trivial or squalid: primal screaming, disaster movies, jogging, disco, Perrier water, pornography. The U.S. lost a President and a war, and not only endured those unique humiliations with grace, but showed enough resilience to bring a Roman-candle burst of spirit to its Bicentennial celebrations...
...century. Illiterate, impoverished and much abused, the peasants were known for their generous nature and a predilection for violence that sometimes led them to burn down the manor house, or even murder the squire, as happened to Dostoyevsky's serf-owning father. To foreigners they seemed a dismal, squalid lot-the men with their scraggly beards and hair, the women with their inevitable head scarves. Though the peasants were in fact a rich repository of folklore and folk art, intellectuals invested them with other qualities. The populists believed them to possess primitive virtues that were unadulterated by the venality...