Sentence examples for downfall less from inspiring English sources

How an Insurance Titan Came to His Downfall Less than two months ago, Maurice R. Greenberg, the head of the American International Group, the world's largest insurer, was at the pinnacle of his career.

On the surface then, A Rake's Progress is a stern moral tale, but Hogarth's vision of Tom's downfall is less judgment than lament, full of compassion for the fool at odds with the city.

Andrei D. Konstantinov, a St .Petersburg-based mafia expert, agreed that Mr. Barsukov's downfall appeared less a triumph for Russia's justice system than the final stages of a power shift from the criminal gangs that were once the country's ultimate arbiters to official government structures that nevertheless remain perforated by criminality and corruption.

Geoffrey Chaucer used the word in Troilus and Criseyde, and in The Canterbury Tales it is applied to a series of stories in the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning "the downfalls (more or less inevitable) of princes".

The successor to Plutarch as a theorist of biography was Samuel Johnson, who believed that "the histories of the downfall of kingdoms" contained less valuable wisdom than the story of human lives.

Its eventual downfall, Gordon argues, had less to do with any public revulsion at its racism than with scandals and corruption: in 1925, an alcoholic Grand Dragon in Indiana was convicted of second-degree murder, after the suicide of a woman whom he had abducted and raped.

Normally the fall of Ceausescu and the advent of post-Communism would represent deliverance for someone with Mr. Manea's history, as similar downfalls did, more or less, in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.

ABC's "Downfall" at 9 drew a less impressive 3.3 million viewers while "Primetime" garnered 3 million at 10.

On one side, we have your traditional, older NFL fans who despise Cam Newton's celebrations and revel in the downfall of anyone who is less than perfect off the field.

Barnes wrote that Thatcher's position on Europe made her a "one-woman awkward squad," but he was cautious about singling Europe out as the sole reason for her downfall: Perhaps what occurred was less close to Shakespeare and Nietzsche than it was to a marriage that runs out of steam and hits the divorce court.

Combined, these incidents less describe the downfall of a family and more describe how it had been rotten for years, as deeds performed long ago slowly corroded its spiritual center.