Word: perfectionist
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Working with Kaufman means working with a perfectionist. Hart called their first job together "The Days of the Terror." The daily schedule was from 10 a. m. "until exhausted," which meant until starved as well, since Kaufman cares nothing for food. They would spend two hours shaping one short sentence, a whole day discussing an exit. Kaufman's working habits are notorious. "In the throes of composition," Collaborator Alexander Woollcott once said, "he seems to crawl up the walls of the apartment in the manner of the late Count Dracula...
...teaching also Dr. Cushing was hard, factual. He never spiced his lectures with humor, never unbent. During his entire career, he taught about 2,500 men from all over the world. To many of them he seemed a cold, reticent perfectionist...
This concern is no political pose with Frank Murphy. Ascetic, perfectionist, he really believes that, instead of becoming a Roman Catholic priest he became a social priest, ordained by his late mother, who taught him to honor Jews and Negroes as highly as other men. In his first mayoral campaign, Detroit called him "Dew and Sunshine" after a speech in which he said that was the kind of new morning Detroit needed. If the so-called Monopoly Investigation imposes upon him the duty of prosecuting any large vested interests, the latter may be sure he will do it with painful...
...labor. The Prime Minister's brave proposals come to nothing, but by the time his cabinet, his constituents, a fierce young female Marxist (Ardis Gains), and his family have indicated their more or less reluctant disapproval, audiences have been treated to a symposium so full of sparkling, perfectionist common sense that they may well forget that they have seen nothing closer to physical action than a young agitator's feeble threat to break a window...
...Author Crow became a Confucian becomes clearer after reading Master Kung, his biography of Confucius. What attracted him to Confucius was not the official perfectionist version of China's greatest historical figure. He became a convert because Confucius seemed the perfect personification of the Golden Mean-a moralist without asceticism, a reformer without fanaticism, a conservative without bigotry, a scholar without pedantry, a rugged individualist with a social conscience-but for all that, a man with such human foibles as touchiness and misogyny...