Word: summum
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...large and odd family," and was reared in the south of England. Her Spartan father, recently deceased, "believed all poets were blackguards, that Moses actually saw God in the brush fire, that ethical excellence could only be inculcated by the heavy rod, that trade was outcast and that the summum bonum of existence was to avoid your neighbor." Miss Gore's mother reared her to believe in poetry, in fantastic superstitions like witches, ghosts and the headless coachman, and in the nobility of the Gores--"if Ireland had her rights each of us would be wearing a coronet...
...should ever come to the University, they too would doubtless receive their deserts and march out, diploma in hand, in a glow of fame. The demands upon teachers, on the other hand, do to a certain extent exist; but the idea of making one or more degrees the summum bonum, sine quanon, be-all and end-all of secondary school instructors is not to be laid at the door of the colleges. If an M.A. is requisite for teachers in, Boston high schools, it is because the administrators of those schools have so ordained...
...ever generous alumnus of Harvard College Year after year, men who have established a round claim to literary accomplishment of that kind most nearly approaching Longinus' definition of the sublime, will give of their personality their particular genius, to the often stressed but seldom realized summum bonum of college life, intellectual inspiration...
...hang any laurel wreaths that may happen to win, something, too, which will make them careless whether they ever win the laurels. When activity, subways full of straphangers, overhead, turnover, widgets, gross profits, and your picture on the front page of a gum-chewer's sheetlet are not the summum bonnet of college graduate, and the emphasis is not on what goes out of college, but on what comes in and why, the Messrs. Andrus of the world will be out of jobs as oracles...
...history as the premier who settled the Irish question than as the one who defeated Germany. (Though it is fair to add that this statement was made after the war.) And there have been many men to whom an amicable peace between England and Ireland has seemed the "summum bonum". To Cromwell after the Irish had rejected (strange to say) the ideas he strove so eloquently to impress on them, it seemed that they were but devils and irreconcilable papists, and that it was his painful but obvious duty to crush them. Yet he was puzzled. So was William before...