Word: tyrant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...always sobering to encounter the intellectual idealists at work, for they seem to live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does. The conversation today reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king--and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are all full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmalz and Henderson...
...Odessa, The Courtyard tells the intermingled life stories of ten families that occupy a single tenement house. No other work of Russian fiction has portrayed the everyday life of ordinary Soviet citizens with such compassion and in such mesmerizing detail. Lvov's villain, the local party boss, and tyrant of the tenement, is as lethal to the human spirit as any hound of hell conjured up by Dostoyevsky...
...standing in front of the unarmed native crowd-seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys...
...resigned his commission. "He had changed," his friend Jacintha recalls. "He seemed more aloof, an unhappy sort of stranger. Whatever happened to him in Burma must have embittered him very much." Blair described the feeling he brought home as "an intolerable sense of guilt." He had been a petty tyrant in the service of what he saw as a vast system of exploitation. He could recognize in the flogged Burmese troublemakers a likeness to himself as a schoolboy, whipped and cowed by the same imperious forces. A childhood conviction had been confirmed: his place was with the oppressed...
Aquino instead chose to follow his own instincts. As one expert recalled Aquino saying at a trial for political dissidence 10 years ago when he was asked to answer charges of subversion. "I rather choose to follow my conscience and accept a tyrant's revenge...