Word: thinker
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...would probably like to be remembered as one for whom literature was only an instrument," Baker added, pointing out that Shaw regarded himself more of a thinker than a writer. "Yet he wrote perhaps the best English prose of his generation...
...neither an original thinker nor a canny leader, but he was a magnificent pamphleteer. In Boston he began publishing the Liberator, a propaganda paper championing abolition. In a dingy room in Merchants' Hall he set up an old press and printed his famous manifesto: "I am in earnest ... I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD." He was as good as his word. Though the Liberator never paid expenses or ever had more than 3,000 subscribers, its articles shook, scandalized and aroused the nation...
...initial difficulty attendant to this problem is finding a good definition of the term "whole man." Is he the "complete Rabelaisian man" to whom Aldous Huxley refers: "great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover, clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs?" To know whether or not Harvard trains "whole men" it is necessary to know what such men are and it will be difficult to arrive at any definition which will not either outrage the convictions of a segment of the student body or else be so abstract as to be meaningless. Furthermore...
...thousands who celebrated the day, it did not seem funny at all. For at 90, John Dewey was still the nation's most noted living philosopher, who had perhaps had more influence on 20th Century America than any other thinker of his day. He had changed the lot of U.S. schoolchildren and molded the minds of their teachers. Supreme Court justices had felt his influence and so had historians, psychologists, artists and politicians. He was the philosopher of a changing America which had found Europe's formal philosophic traditions hard to adapt to day-to-day living...
...time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain's. In the word's true sense he was, like Thoreau, a radical. But he was also a political conservative, to the dismay of the assorted pinks and reds...