Word: rochefoucauld
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...military coalition. "He was most complex," Miller writes. "Dwight Eisenhower could and did outsmart, outthink, outmaneuver, outgovern, and outcommand almost anybody you'd care to name, including Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and yes, even Franklin Roosevelt. I don't know that he ever read Niccolo Machiavelli or La Rochefoucauld, but he practiced what they preached...
...that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." François de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice...
...these observations lack the polish of La Rochefoucauld or Stendhal, they serve the author's high purpose. Singled Out is not, after all, a pillow book. It is a guide for the perplexed, who are warned away from useless rage and grief, and humanely advised to "behave with a certain kindness, civility and tact, to ease one another's passage through this changeable and occasionally brutal world." Such counsel may not be quoted in the Playboy Philosophy, but it ought to be singled out for inclusion with every marriage license - and separation paper...
...lesson in all such instances, as the wise have always told us, is the abiding value of silence. La Rochefoucauld, for example, got down to his usual brass tacks by calling silence "the best tactic for him who distrusts himself." It is not simply that silence is generally prudent; it also encourages the presumption of virtue, appearing-especially in times of adversity-as a sign of both discretion and suffering. How unlikely (goes the public reasoning) that a guilty party would endure calumnies without a peep...
...appears she also knows her La Rochefoucauld: "There are good marriages, but no delightful ones...