WordWealth: unconscionable

un·con·scion·a·ble , adj.

In their attempts to cover up the criminal acts of the Watergate burglars, President Nixon and his immediate staff were guilty of unconscionable behavior. —— Norman Schur in '1000 Most Important Words'

No feasible amount of cash assistance could solve America's poverty problem, even in principle. The problem has changed. It has become more behavioral than economic.--I grew up, in the 1960s and 1970s, taking for granted that the poor were just like you and me, only with less money. They were victims of a stingy government and a harsh economy. Poverty could be abolished by writing checks. America's unwillingness to rise to the task showed an unconscionable lack of compassion and common sense. —— Jonathan Rauch; Forget About Haves and Have-Nots. Think Do's And Do-Nots; amount of cash assistance could save America's poverty problem; the Atlantic; Sep 23, 2003

Remember, remember the 11th of September. The most dastardly fireworks the world has ever seen will never be forgotten, either in the United States or the rest of the world. The massive loss of civilian life - office workers, school children, hijacked airplane passengers, emergency workers - represents an unconscionable river of blood, shed by an enemy attack on US soil for the first time since Pearl Harbour, and is nothing less than a series of atrocities.--Uncomfortably for Americans, and for ourselves given the umbilical cord which seems to connect our foreign and military policies, the fact is that their loss and the massive attack on the US state itself which caused it will be, privately or publicly, the subject of celebration in many parts of the world. —— George Galloway; Reaping the Whirlwind; the Guardiaan; Wed. Sept 12, 2001

Teachers tend to purvey what they themselves have learned. The pattern of the basic curriculum is extraordinarily rigid, and has never been critically reconstructed from the ground up, except in a few favored institutions. In the main the schools continue to teach it for no better reason than that it has always been taught.--Now how much confidence can we have that a body of content so selected is really worth learning? Surely very little! Can we say that it is a balanced and representative sampling of the best and finest that the human spirit has achieved and is achieving? By no means. In the standard curriculum there is some fine gold, but also an unconscionable quantity of dross. —— James L. Mursell; The Defeat of the Schools; the Atlantic; March 1939

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