Word: thinker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though Dirty Linen finds Stoppard in poor form as a thinker, it has its funny moments--when he resists the temptation to use simple bawdy humor and recovers his quirky intellectual muse. In the original London production of the show, the company had a sense of proportion, and carefully understated the strangeness of Stoppard's dialogue to make it sound more believable. Thus the show's introductory sequence--in which two MPs arrive in the committee room and converse for several minutes using only foreign cliches--succeeded through the lack of self-consciousness on the stage...
...will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking," to which Edison added one of his own: "The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasures in life." A most unorthodox and in many ways unattractive thinker, Edison nonetheless multiplied the pleasures of life for everyone who listens to a record, watches a movie or flips a light switch...
Fame has a way of ruining a writer's reputation. Take the case of Kurt Vonnegut, who became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug...
Still undergraduates when Keynesianism was flourishing in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the new economists are now professors in their own right at universities around the country. Among them: Martin Feldstein, 39, of Harvard, who is the leading thinker in the group; Robert Lucas, 41, of the University of Chicago; Michael Boskin, 33, of Stanford; Rudiger Dornbusch, 37, and Stanley Fischer, 35, both of M.I.T.; as well as many, many others...
Devil's paintbrush, daisies, lupin, blowing in the hay grass, quickly sprouted and gone, lovely but not to be sentimentalized, the dependable product of sun, rain and horse manure. It is hard not to think of Liz Taylor, especially if the thinker happens to have been twelve when she was twelve, all brave and radiant in National Velvet. (Teddy Kennedy was twelve then, and so was John Updike, but they had not wandered into the witch's house, were not on public view.) Some of the present class of very young actresses will become fat, will be many times divorced...