Word: truisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world, in the meantime everyone is dying of indifference and analysis. Which is more unoriginal, the critique of its technique, is moot. The amazing thing is that Lessing takes herself seriously. The language of "Report" may be pseudo-scientific, but mock-serious it is not. Lessing slaps on truism after truism with the plaster knife of all her wellworn and well meaning liberal convictions. Once again the saving grace of humor is absent where it is most needed...
...Truism. In a marked softening of previous attitudes, the convention adopted a resolution, paralleling the recommendations of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, urging that felony penalties for the possession of "insignificant" quantities of pot be abandoned. In professional tones, the A.M.A. urged further scientific studies of cannabis...
Clearly, in the complex industrial world we inhabit everything is, in one way or another, related to everything else. But all that this amounts to is the truism that there can be no absolutes in our moral judgment. Nothing is purely right or purely wrong; similarly, no one is entirely responsible or is entirely without blame for the many evils that beset us. Our values and our judgments are not only relative, but can only be practically employed in terms of degrees of intensity. In making practical ethical judgments two things are uppermost in our minds: the degree of voluntariness...
Although murder is part of the fabric of history, it has assumed an alarming quality in America today. It is a new truism that violence has become what sex used to be, the object of morbid fascination. A sort of blind Mansonism hangs in the air-an incomprehensible glorification of death and destruction...
...their ability to continue the war. Henry Kissinger has privately told reporters that a major fear he shares with the President is that "domestic protest in this country reaches a level where Hanoi simply awaits the collapse of our domestic position." And it has by now almost become a truism that the President, if faced with the threat of massive dissent or disruption in the United States, will have to rethink his prosecution of the war. And so we must determine how best to create the domestic situation that will force Nixon to meet our demands...