Word: vicious
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...belie the savage misfortunes that have befallen its people. The soil is so rich it sprouts vegetation at the drop of a seed, yet that has not prevented Bengal from becoming a festering wound of poverty. Nature can be as brutal as it is bountiful, lashing the land with vicious cyclones and flooding it annually with the spillover from the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers...
...respect for the rule of law, or age. Singling out ten magistrates judged to be among the most "flamboyantly" awful of all, the council's report recorded a series of scathing opinions. "Difficult to believe he had ever attended law school," it said of one. "A loudmouth, showoff, vicious, vindictive bully," was one lawyer's judgment on another magistrate. On still another: "Ignorant, arbitrary, contemptuous of those who appear before him and highly bigoted against various groups, especially blacks." The more Establishment-minded Chicago Bar Association, by contrast, found only 38 of the magistrates unqualified...
...also appears that the vote on Kissinger was occasioned by an intricate and, at times, vicious gossip game which has long been a part of the Cambridge-Washington circuit. Since last May-when a dozen senior Faculty members visited the White House for an on-the-record conversation with Kissinger in which they denounced the President's decision to invade Cambodia-one of the most publicly effective objections to national policy has been the opposition of Kissinger's most eminent colleagues. But within government and Washington society, one of Kissinger's most potent weapons is a widespread impression that Harvard...
...student body proved more receptive than ever before to University counterattack: before long, most of the disrupters were spending their dinner hours defending the action to students who asked how anyone could excuse such a vicious attack on free speech at Harvard. Three years of explanation that the University was not neutral, that it was inextricably tied to the war-making apparatus of the monster society it lived in, that it could not honestly pose as the defender of liberal values-all seemed wiped out. More students than ever seemed willing to believe that Harvard could be a sanctuary...
...carve out a little niche where I won't be bothered in a world which can grant me nothing of what I really desire. Maybe I must adjust my desires to what the world will grant, and be what has been, and thus hope it will always be, because vicious and unpleasant though it may be, it is real and requires no faith, no struggle, to achieve it; and it will accept me in my smallness and not blame my failures but reward me for them and ask only passive allegiance and silence while it does its work...