Word: realist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jespersen was a man of temperament, a great teacher and-in his field-a great realist. Upon English grammar he gazed with a fondly passionate eye, that knew and loved it as it was, not as it should be. Upon England he looked somewhat as though she were Denmark's interesting offspring.* A Social-Democrat, Jespersen liked neither capital letters (used for all Danish nouns) nor kings (although he did not much mind Denmark's King Christian X). He saw traces of the democratic spirit in the very bones and muscles of English speech...
...year and a half of kaleidoscopic transition failed to change General McNair's dissatisfaction. A soft-spoken man with light blue eyes, he is perhaps the 20-minute hardboiled realist of the U.S. high command. When others were gasping at the growing might of the U.S. Army in October 1941 (around 1,600,000), McNair said only: "Our great potentialities must not lull us into complacency." Earlier (in Louisiana) he got to the verge of unbridled praise: "If the troops' equipment were completed, they would give a better account of themselves today than American troops...
...Tories. They have been unable to outdo the conservatism of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberal Party. At the same time they have offered no program to offset the "frightening gains" of the mildly socialistic C.C.F. (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation). In Bracken the die-hards saw a realist with statesmanlike qualities that were most eloquently expressed in his backing of the ill-fated Sirois report (TIME, Jan. 27, 1941). Young liberal Tories saw in Bracken at least a partial answer to their demands for vision in government and dynamic leadership...
...always faces distinctively Christian bodies. We must ... not confine ourselves to uttering mere platitudes. We must . . . avoid seeming to put the authority of Christ and His Church behind political and economic schemes which, however laudable in purpose, may be presently impracticable. . . . Actually, I believe that Christ was the great realist. ... He did not propound specific reforms and advocate specific revolts. But what He taught operated as political and social dynamite, because those that believed His word were forced to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward the social and political systems under which they lived...
...realist, he is dogmatic in his insistence that ethics are tools, that thought is relative. To a realist any form of internationalism is a cloak for a dominant group. To him a balanced power is fairer than any World Federation which would be simply a disguise for Anglo-American hegemony. One need not be a Utopian, however, to feel that Spykman's world order excludes any finite goal, any emotional appeal, or any basis for action. Even Karl Marx, after all, had to postulate a goal in which his discouraging dialectic no longer worked...