Word: ruthlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some people have said I can be as ruthless as Marcos. I don't deny that. I admit you cannot run the Philippines with weak leadership. I believe in a strong presidency, but a strong presidency with checks: a free judiciary and a free press...
...takeover of our country. Because I always refused to repudiate my ideas, I was systematically beaten, kept in solitary confinement, physically and mentally tortured. My mind and my hands still bear the traces. I saw my companions tortured; I was both witness to and victim of a violent and ruthless penitentiary system...
...World War." Some revisionists now say that the Emperor's melancholy reserve masks the spirit of a shrewd and scheming warmonger. Most historians, however, contend that in spite of, or indeed because of, his unassuming pacifism, the unworldly scholar was often unable to dominate his nation's ruthless army. In 1941, for example, Japan's leaders turned to Hirohito while deliberating whether to join the war. Without explanation, the poker-faced monarch proceeded to recite a gnomic waka (a traditional 31-syllable poem) composed by his grandfather, the Meiji emperor: "On the seas surrounding all quarters...
...misstatements of fact. "The operative word is ignorant," Curtis Wilkie, a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe, told Hodding Carter. "He's lazy. He's not stupid. He's shrewd. He's a smart politician." Sam Donaldson of ABC added: "You combine a very mechanized, ruthless ability to control the flow of news and Mr. Reagan's absence of a lot of depth . . . and you have a situation that just drives us up the wall...
Johnson supplements this observation with brief, vivid histories that illustrate the natural advantage of the ruthless and unrestrained. All the evidence suggests that the century's major revolutionary tyrants have killed considerably more of their native populations than the governments they replaced. Lenin and Stalin perverted socialist ideals and millions of Russians died. In Central and Eastern Europe, nationalists succeeded in gaining self-determination only to repress ethnic minorities within their own borders...