Word: wisdoms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...middle, it is generally agreed, is the right place to be. To the Greeks, moral wisdom was to be found in the golden mean. Modern political candidates, positioning themselves where they think the voters want them, shrewdly head for the middle. So if the middle is both the sensible and winning place to be, why is it also so boring and in some ways so discredited...
...politics, the great modern exponent of the wisdom of the middle was, of course, Eisenhower. Summoned to office when American politics had become excessively cantankerous, his above-politics politics proved to be the winningest of all. His imitators have been striving for the same tone ever since. In his first State of the Union speech, Eisenhower (or his speechwriter) did a semantic balancing act that would have impressed Aristotle, promising to steer a middle course in foreign affairs "between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly." The poet Robert Frost, growing impatient...
Later that evening Nixon told the King: "I know that most people come to Saudi Arabia to get oil. We can use oil, but we need more, something that is worth far more than oil-we need wisdom." The President should have stopped there, but perhaps showing the strain of the trip, he rambled on: "Just to demonstrate that I am somewhat of a practical politician, let me say that while we treasure most your wisdom that we will take with us after this visit, we of course will need the oil to carry us to our next stop...
...Your Grace has given a president of wisdom above all princes..." -Henry VIII...
Money Power. How did Mrs. Caine survive? By bitter flippancies scribbled down on yellow pads late at night ("How's my master plan, God dear? What have you got coming up?"). By folk wisdom, like "Move the body" (she pedaled endless miles on a stationary bicycle). By psychiatric therapy. By working hard at her job. By just waiting out the ordeal. (She has not remarried.) How would she do it differently if she had to do it again? She would talk about death more openly to her husband, to her children. She would not try to stiff-upper...