ruling passion

Nostalgia maintains its grip on the imagination and dominates as the ruling passion, he says, after greed, anger and resistance to authority.

He sometimes depicted hermaphrodites and amputees; an editor observed in 1895 that Beardsley’s “ruling passion is a desire to astonish the public with the unexpected.”

But she told ScienceInsider that she plans to continue pursuing basic science into her “ruling passion: understanding how life works.”

There are Americans today who submit to a ruling passion that favors uniquely the interests of Israel, and the president had them in mind when he invoked his duties under the Constitution toward the only country whose framework of laws and institutions he had sworn to uphold.

A year earlier, the Marquis de Caulaincourt had written that “the need for rest was so universally felt through every class of society, and in the army, that peace at any price had become the ruling passion of the day.”