Word: summum
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...young men of that time who were, like myself, seeking to find the summum bonum of life were not being led to religion by that atmosphere. I do not wish to criticize Harvard; she gave me many of my dearest friends, as well as my admirable instruction in the law, but I was a young man of 21 troubled by religious doubts which young men are troubled by in their search for the living truth of life, and I got none of that from Harvard...
...biography and, he thought, to enlarge it with the prestige of destiny. Chambers' high school classmates voted him "Class Prophet." Many years later, in the '50s, after Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury and the cold war had hardened into a nuclear stalemate, Chambers wrote his summum, which he called Witness, meaning history's witness, a prophet looking backward...
...world is more complicated than the Manichean division of oppressor and oppressed upon which so much liberal polemic is based, and life consists in more than the abundance or equality of material and political possessions which seems to be the summum bonum of most modern liberal thought...
Like thousands of 60s leftists turned 80s salary-earners, I don't believe that money-making is inherently bad. But neither should it be a summum bonum. Individual profit-seeking must be weighed against a larger social good. That's why we condemn Ford Motor Company for its combusting Pinto and Frank Lorenzo for his union-busting...
...nearly superhuman effort. But the same ideal, Skinner maintains, now threatens 20th century man's continued existence. "My book,'' says Skinner, ''is an effort to demonstrate how things go bad when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and dignity. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down." In fact, Skinner believes that Western culture may die and be replaced, perhaps, with the more disciplined culture of the Soviet Union or of China. If that happens. Western man will have lost the only form of immortality he can hope...