Word: weal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sterilization of all German citizens--not simply those in custody or institutions--who displayed symptoms of a number of presumptively hereditary afflictions, including blindness, schizophrenia and offensive physical deformities. Government officials countered potential objections about the cruelty of this measure by asserting that personal sacrifices would serve the common weal. "We go beyond neighborly love," said one. "We extend it to future generations. Therein lies the high ethical value and justification of the law." As Kevles notes, the Nazis' draconian eugenics program did not originally encompass the anti-Semitism that later so rabidly characterized the Third Reich. But as Hitler...
...personal contribution to the public weal, I refused to write about Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr or any of the rest of it for more than six months this year. Believe it or not, I had no trouble filling a political column three times a week for that entire period without the aid of Ms. Lewinsky. There were mountains of interesting things to write about, of rather direct concern to large numbers of people. (A special favorite: the phone company has decided to start charging customers $3 a month for not using long distance. You must admit, it's a concept...
...early 1960s nor to obscure either Kennedy's personal flaws or the fact that his actions sometimes didn't match his soaring rhetoric. But that rhetoric still resonates because it put forth a faith that the highest duty of government, and of us all, was to improve the common weal. It was rhetoric which helped energize the nation because it was spoken by a politician who said proudly that "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics'.... It's the way a president gets things done...
...current political climate--hostile to any measure of dependence on the government--serves to reinforce feelings of hostility to those who rely on the public weal. As a result, we've seen the reinvocation of the specter of poor houses and orphanges as the natural, even logical, destination for those who are unable to provide fully or partially for themselves...
...smoke rings. For the college set, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward R. Murrow were the patron saints of nicotine. F.D.R.'s cigarette, in a holder at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a man of the people, while the . can-do bosses of the public weal sucked on fat cigars. Smoke-filled rooms gave us Social Security and the Marshall Plan. In smoke-free rooms we get S&L fraud and Whitewater...