With its long and lousy track record, it is little wonder that even the sober thinkers at the Economist concluded that "nuclear is the dream that failed".
Once upon a time, the end of the cold war would have been seen as good news in that regard, but the possible advent of bioterrorism, genetical engineering mishaps and novel pandemics has led some otherwise sober thinkers, like Martin Rees, the Cambridge University cosmologist, to suggest that Civilization as We Know It won't make it out of the present century.
He came up through the military with a reputation as an army bureaucrat rather than a combat officer, as a sober strategic thinker, and as the rare honest man in a junta of kleptocrats.
These are serious thinkers here.
But much though we enjoy partying and Latin American lifestyles, in the end we thought maracuyá just a touch frivolous.That left two sober 19th century thinkers and statesmen.
Sober-minded big-picture thinker Jim Stack, editor of Whitefish, Mont.-based Investech Research, has grown even more bullish on stocks, based on his technical read of the market.
The seated figure, a heroic, classical male nude in sober meditation, suggests Auguste Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker".
It also deprives Congress of its last significant intellectual a man described by the normally sober "Almanac of American Politics" as "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson".This is not to say that post-Moynihan Washington will be bereft of either intelligence or ideas.
In selecting his cabinet, George W. Bush generally passed over provocative thinkers and people who give good interviews in favor of sober executives.
One of the premier scholars of Russian philosophy in the US, Scanlan has a general approach that is sober and urbane; he makes a spirited and convincing defense of Dostoevsky as an innovative thinker.
