Word: stupidness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...barbarians! Who invented and still employs the guillotine? [Cries of "Die Franzosen!" (The French!)] Who exterminated whole social classes? [Cries of "Die Bolschewiken!" (The Bolsheviks!)] ... It is stupid to say 'Hitler means war.' . . . He tore the Treaty of Versailles to pieces and threw them in the faces of its beneficiaries. By so doing war was avoided...
...When he is tricked by both the mistress and his father, Laurent denounces him, is dumfounded to learn that everybody knows about this affair and many others besides. The oldest boy, Joseph, escapes the family by turning himself into a money-making machine; the dull and stupid Ferdinand marries a girl as secretive as himself; Daughter Cécile becomes a concert pianist, admired by Debussy, loved by a composer whose music is so hopelessly bad he kills himself. In its last 358 pages The Pasquier Chronicles gets genuinely mysterious in its confused diffusion. A score of new characters...
Temperamentally, Harry Luce was TIME'S lightning; Brit Hadden its thunder. Young Editor Hadden, black-haired, bushy-browed and so nervous that he never sat still, always scowled at copy, generally from beneath a green eyeshade. Vexed by a stupid blunder* he would growl out loud, sometimes stamp his feet. Pleased by an apt phrase, he would vent a guffaw that apprised TIME'S writers that a new phrase had been canonized in TIME style. Disdainful of "gumchewers," he always chewed gum. Contemptuous of dead literature, he constantly held up Homer† as an example to TIME...
...does the author, as one reviewer has suggested, always "invent arguments for his opponents that not even the stupidest of them has used." The beauty of Arnold's book is that he quotes freely from Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann, and Westbrook Pegler. Perhaps Arnold does pick the more stupid of their writings, but at a casual glance these excerpts seemed rather typical...
...unlike Babbitt, Fred Cornplow is harassed by two extraordinarily rude, extravagant, self-centred children who almost drive him crazy and then try to lock him in a sanitarium so he can recover the mental balance they have destroyed. Son Howard is a handsome, stupid, unprincipled college boy who is always borrowing money, wrecking his father's cars, and trying to lie his way out. Daughter Sara is a handsome, ill-natured poseur who becomes a Communist, falls in love with an agitator, overdraws her allowance of $1,000 a year and spends most of her time making poisonous remarks...