Word: zeal
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Evidently the attacks on the patriotism of the International Council of Women which met recently in Washington have whetted rather than diminished its zeal for reform. The Council plans a five-year campaign to improve motion pictures artistically, morally and educationally. A committee of eight women will concentrate on a few large producing centers, and the work will be extended as soon as ways can be found to assist in purging films of objectionable features...
...zeal of the reformer always involves a desire to undertake more than can be accomplished, and the International Council is no exception to the rule. Even by "concentrating on a few large centers of production" the women can do no more than utter a few feeble protests at what they consider wrong. The motion picture industry, is too strongly intrenched to yield, unless it encounters more serious opposition than eight women can muster. The International Council is making a brave gesture, but like most brave gestures, it is also quite futile...
Every member of the Why-nots wears about his neck a brass collar on which is engraved the motto of the tribe: "Be Thyself!" This excellent precept is understood to mean: "Be different from everyone else!" So great is their zeal that they wear their hair long and unshorn, go without hats in all weathers, assemble to discuss poetry and free love when others are attending an athletic festival, and flood the bookstalls with tracts denouncing everybody and everything...
...world a new era of freedom--freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and press, freedom from petty governmental aggression. On the eve of the celebration of that event the bureaucracies of Boston and Cambridge swoop down upon the newsstands and with a grand gesture of patriotic and ethical zeal, carry off every available copy of the Lampoon, as if it were a carrier of pestilence and destruction. Nothing could be more ludicrous, more utterly absurd if it were not so crass and insolent a demonstration of petty tyranny...
...Liberal Club in the matter of censorship is too well known to need elucidation. There are, of course, on the news stands many periodicals for the suppression of which more or less reasonable argument might be advanced; but in the case of the suppression of the Lampoon, surely the zeal of our protectors has outrun itself...