What does shrewdness mean?
Shrewdness means The quality of being shrewd..
Looking up this word…
Checking saved dictionary data and trusted language sources. This will stop automatically if a source does not respond.
Checking saved dictionary data and trusted language sources. This will stop automatically if a source does not respond.
Pronunciation varies by accent · noun
The quality of being shrewd..
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.
Use shrewdness when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Shrewdness means The quality of being shrewd..
Common synonyms include perspicacity, astuteness, perspicaciousness.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
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.
FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0
Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.