Shrewdness

Definitions

1. The quality of being shrewd.
   countable, uncountable
2. An invented collective name for a group of apes.
   countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“A man with less worldly shrewdness would never have⟳ seen how things really stood; a man with less pliability could never have⟳ adapted himself to them. It must always be remembered, that his whole administration was one long struggle⟳: he had to maintain⟳ his master on the throne, and himself in the ministry; and this was done by sheer force⟳ of talent.”

“At the centre of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called ‘moral fortitude’ higher in a general than genius or experience⟳. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav-Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilović was ‘a shrewd man’, Stalin commented, as though to himself: ‘Yes, there are politicians who think⟳ shrewdness is the main thing in politics. . . .’⁴⁴ His was a will-power taken to a logical extreme. There is something non-human about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.”

CEFR level