Word: cynically
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...diamond fields-90% of the world's diamonds. He entered the South African Parliament, and nine years later was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. By bribery, intrigue, diplomacy, persuasion, force he worked to bring about a united South Africa. Like most men of action a mixture of cynic and sentimentalist, he made no bones of his tricky actions but could not bear to have his ambition thought sordid...
...said that a certain Elizabethan poet, a rugged fellow and something of a cynic, ordered that a Latin inscription be carved under his name on his tombstone, which translated reads: "Dedicated to Oblivion." The Vagabond, like a bad preacher, has put the text at the end of the sermon, but perhaps it can pass for a moral as well...
...Vagabond was, they said, cynical, but they were wrong. There are excuses in this mortal life for anything, if they must be given, and while it is better to let the scoffing charge pass unnoticed, cynical is a hard word. Everyone may go by a softer name but the cynic. The sinister, cheerful lawbreaker who warms your entrails is an "importer." He who steals your trashy purse because you pay safely by check, is no usurer, but a respectable banker. So along the line, gentlemen all, does the world avoid rasping unpleasantness, except the cynic, whose avocation of cavity...
...cynic might question whether the youthful exuberance of Mr. Wrigley at the age of seventy, which his rector marked for particular moral approbation, had any special merit even from the most ordinary perspective. . . . We are not sure whether the man who is driven to despair by the sufferings of the world would not have virtues which are morally preferable to this kind of superficial optimism and exuberance...
...graceful bevy of women, and then reluctantly turned back to the canvas before him. Haussman cut great swaths through the Hutter of Parisian slums. A man called Offenbach sat back in his box watching he world dance to his thinking melolics. Some where off in a back room a cynic with a long nose was muttering, We dance, but we dance upon a volcano. In such fashion did the Second Empire sweep through...