Word: venal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...advantage was cancer. On his deathbed, unable to ply his wiles, he was superseded at Time Warner by Gerald Levin. Superseded but not replaced. Ross was the inimitable master of the art of seduction. From Spielberg to the Time Inc. board, he convinced others that he wasn't a venal capitalist -- he was really George Bailey...
...this is a presidency that makes a public fetish of its virtuousness. The Clintons really do believe that they are doing God's work on health care, welfare, national service, etc., and that those who oppose them do so for the most venal, usually pecuniary, motives. They really do believe theirs is the politics of virtue. Hillary Clinton spent so much time championing the politics of virtue that she earned a cover photograph in the New York Times Magazine last year showing her dressed in purest white, with the accompanying article headlined SAINT HILLARY...
...defense fund and many other groups would jump at the chance of a precedent-setting suit? Why is Andy's huge family so conspicuously loving, so unanimously supportive? Why do the good guys have to be so pristine and the bad guys -- senior law partners, of course -- so ostentatiously venal? Andy's last joke is one that all viewers are expected to applaud: "What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start...
...comments should shock every citizen of the United States. We should be appalled that politicians, the people to whom we trust the government of this nation, freely admit practices that seek to prohibit the exercise of civil rights. When someone tries to keep you from voting, they become as venal and despicable as the thugs of a totalitarian dictator...
...great names of American writing cut their teeth in the press -- Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. But until well into this century, most reporters fit the Duke of Wellington's description of the English soldier -- "the scum of the earth." They were lively but ignorant, and often venal. The spread of college education affected even them, however, until by now all journalists know something, though perhaps less than everything. With skills came pride. Journalists no longer submit to having their take on reality circumscribed by the people who happen to sign their paychecks...