Word: squalor
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...have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one's own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings of wealth. Now that youth takes abundance for granted, it can afford to reject materialism...
...complacent bourgeois morality and materialism has a claim on Greene's highly singular sympathies-a strong contributing cause to Greene's distaste for the U.S. character, which is liable to pop up petulantly on any occasion. America, after all, is a place where leprosy, torture, martyrdoms, squalor and fear are not thought to be the common lot of man, and Americans, in their base way, are content that this should...
...self, and sets them against the wall of a squalid Roman slum. Surrealistically oozing globules and pustules contrast with saints' pictures and comic-book illustrations. The result is an emphatically modern version of everyday hell, but it is more than merely nightmare for its own sake. The squalor usually serves to set off the loveliness of some ver dant Tuscan mountain landscape, distantly viewed. Of Exterior Wall with Landscape, he observes, "One might say that the window is the fantasy and the wall is reality. Every idyllic vision is out of the window and far away...
...Negro successfully robs a bank instead of a chicken coop we can honestly claim to be emancipated." The speaker is a character in this flawed but forceful first novel. The scene is a Southern city in the 1930s. For the Negroes who dwell there in remorseless squalor, a measure of freedom and manhood can be earned only by breaking the white man's law. For a bright, ambitious Negro, the best way to prosperity is not through business or the professions but in the illicit sporting life: gambling and the rackets...
Those who were not cured often stayed on. They were treated as human beings by their foster families at a time when the mentally ill almost everywhere else were banished from society to asylums of appalling squalor and cruelty. Originally, Geel's boarding system for the mentally ill was supervised by officials of the Roman Catholic Church; since 1860, the Belgian government has had the responsibility of screening the patients and administering the program...