No question but the novelist would have welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress made in her own homeland in the century since her birth.    From Wordnik.com.  [Recent Developments in European Thought] Reference

Not sure that locating the failure in the moral arena makes me a meliorist or not.    From Wordnik.com.  [Handicapping the Horse Race] Reference

The best known meliorist was Élie Metchnikoff who argues that man can overcome “premature” aging by.    From Wordnik.com.  [LONGEVITY] Reference

Walter Lipmann, a columnist who wrote in the middle years of the last century, called himself a meliorist.    From Wordnik.com.  [CNN Transcript Oct 6, 2002] Reference

But while her virtue and courage are not open to question, her judgment is, and points to the limits of a meliorist approach to evil.    From Wordnik.com.  [Matthew Yglesias » Helen Suzman] Reference

Excerpt: In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics.    From Wordnik.com.  [Schlesinger Obit, Samurai Vader, IQ Scarcity, Floyd/Bee Gees Mashup] Reference

News at Eleven: Many, like Virginia Woolf, were struck by his Thomas Hardy's kindliness, and he insisted on calling himself an "evolutionary meliorist," not a pessimist.    From Wordnik.com.  [News at Eleven: Many, like Virginia Woolf, were struck] Reference

This conception was more meliorist than optimist, for the prayer that the Lord's kingdom should come implied an ongoing process of becoming until the Parousia at the end of time.    From Wordnik.com.  [REFORMATION] Reference

That soul who is Kyu in the first story (and Kokila, Katima, and so on thereafter) is combative, imprudent, and prone to getting himself (or herself) killed; while Bold (Bihari, Bistami . . . ) is more comfortable in the world, meliorist and optimistic.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2008-10-01] Reference

One prefers to hope he didn't, with the invincible optimism one has for the behaviour of lovable people; but whether or not his kind attempt at colloquy is the first indication I can find of that active sympathy with the disabilities of his fellow-beings which stamped him later so intelligent a meliorist.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Imperialist] Reference

In place of the conservative hostility to meliorist or utopian visions and skepticism about bold governmental initiatives, many neocons have embraced a Brave New World in which American exceptionalism holds sway everywhere and peoples around the globe abandon their own cultures in favor of Western ideals.    From Wordnik.com.  [Sands of Empire] Reference

But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the ailments of man can all be set right.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Man Shakespeare] Reference

The meliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong; much painful; what can we do to improve it?".    From Wordnik.com.  [Post-Prandial Philosophy] Reference

(The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fécondité," turned meliorist and idealist, and became ludicrous.).    From Wordnik.com.  [A Book of Prefaces] Reference

(In his 700-page new “meliorist” novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader proposes a kind of plutocrats’ coup, in which Warren Buffett, Bill Gates Sr.    From Wordnik.com.  [How America Can Rise Again] Reference

It doesn’t seem such a great stretch to suppose that when McCain or Palin mock the idea that we should “spread the wealth around,” they’re talking about a maximin view that aims at making people as equal as possible, rather than a meliorist threshold view that aims only at avoiding particular very bad outcomes.    From Wordnik.com.  [Types of Redistribution] Reference

A successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist.    From Wordnik.com.  [Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion] Reference

October 17th, 2005 at 4: 04 pm konopelli says: schultz is no liberal, CERTAINLY-FER GODDAM-SURE he is no ‘progressive.’ what ed schultz demonstrates is exactly how lame and irrelevant the so-called ‘left’ is when it is neither liberal nor progressive … he’s a meliorist, a centrist shitheel … he doesn’t really want the busheviks gone; he just wants ‘em to play fair by the rules ….    From Wordnik.com.  [Think Progress » BREAKING: Barber Cancels Ed Schultz’s Debut on Armed Forces Radio] Reference

Conservative historian JCD Clark has written of the need to challenge "the American public myth" and has posited a 'counterfactual' to the success of the American Revolution: "a transatlantic world of peace and trade would have promoted the economic development and population growth of Britain's American colonies; without the war of 1776-83, which devastated the colonial economy and delayed its development by decades, the wealth and power of a libertarian North Atlantic polity might have promoted meliorist reform in France rather than philosophe-inspired revolution.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2008-10-01] Reference

10) Addressing the Tennessee legislature two months later, he added such meliorist objectives as allowing the South.    From Wordnik.com.  [Congress, the President, and the Battle of Ideas: Vietnam Policy, 1965-1969] Reference

The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Revolutionist’s Handbook] Reference