Dying to Know quotes, among others, Jean de la Fontaine: "Death never takes a wise man by surprise.
"If you can judge a wise man by the colour of his skin," sings Tyler, "then mister you're a better man than I".
In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (CHU) and Cities of Words, Cavell develops what he calls "Emersonian moral perfectionism," of which he finds an exemplary expression in Emerson's "History": "So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self".
A general who became the head-of-state of a foreign power, implicated in a brutal massacre, was puffed as a wise man by a popular American journalist.
The same is true of Bill Clinton, who left office under a hail of ethics questions but is now considered a bona fide Wise Man by Democrats and even some Republicans.
They can be discovered only by experience, an experience communicated by ancient books compiled by wise men of the past.
But after World War I, Croly was bitterly disappointed by the follies of Wilson's wise men at Versailles and by the crass self-interest of the business lobbies that dominated 1920's Washington.
This was the nub of a proposal a year ago by a group of "wise men", chaired by a Belgian central banker, Alexandre Lamfalussy, to speed up the creation of an EU-wide securities market by 2003.So much for the wholesale markets.
Such long delays were behind the proposals in a recent report by a group of "wise men", led by Baron Alexandre Lamfalussy, for a streamlined procedure for the adoption of EU directives on financial services and securities markets.
Following Aristotle's Topics, John presents a conception of logic as a discipline that begins with principles generally agreed upon by wise men in the scientific disciplines, moving on to construct persuasive arguments from these principles.
