Word: vain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...directed by him, Gerry Bamman's Or gon is pompous, adenoidal, often petulantly childish; he reveres Tartuffe in or der to assert his moral superiority over a family that has grown fractious. Harris Yulin's Tartuffe is cold and cobra-like, vengeful and vain. He has a genuine element of fervor: he endures ritual flogging, dispenses alms, even appears to heal the halt and lame. But there is nothing inspirational in him and nothing ennobling in his impact. In the opening scenes, the actors appear in clownish whiteface and lurch like robots. The playing reaches its tenderest pitch...
...said. Then, in muted tones, he summed up his conduct as a candidate: "If in my high moments, I have done some good, offered some service, shed some light, healed some wounds, rekindled some hope ... or in any way ... helped somebody, then this campaign has not been in vain." Next he made a confession: "If in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude, through some error of temper, taste or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain or revived someone's fears, that was not my truest self.. . Please forgive me. Charge it to my head...
...women vehemently protested this betrayal to their former allies, but in vain. Votes for women were not "a practical thing," said Theodore Tilton. Said another former abolitionist: "It is the Negro's hour." Susan B. Anthony angrily retorted, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the Black man and not for woman." She and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association...
...remedy, aside from conducting experiments-elsewhere, the scientists have been looking to the government for more money, but in vain...
...invitations to the bizarre Nazi Bierabends (get-togethers over beer) organized for the press by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. Hermann Göring would circulate, fat, affable and crude; then came the Führer's "somewhat dim-witted 'deputy,' " Rudolf Hess; then the "vain, pompous, incredibly stupid" Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was to be Foreign Minister. Shirer recalls being dumbfounded by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Education Minister, a bureaucratic ideologue who explained the difference between serious, careful, Aryan physics and the degenerate Jewish physics, as represented by the mountebank Einstein...