Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...vitality as this strange and fitful novel possesses comes from Beckett's images of defeat, e.g., a bum transfixed on a city bench, a dog too weak to follow his master's steps, and from his hero's sometimes poignant inability to cope with events or comprehend reality: "I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing." As a craftsman, Beckett tries to convey the chaotic by means of the incoherent, and fails. He possesses fierce intellectual honesty...
...Otter Ego. Stevenson's approach to politics has the same kind of intellectual detachment−a detachment that few working politicos will ever comprehend. What was taken for vacillation in 1952 when Harry Truman offered him the presidential nomination was, to Stevenson, an agonizing awareness of his earlier promise to run for re-election as governor of Illinois, pitted against a desire for service on the national scene. His humility and lack of confidence upon nomination ("Let this cup pass from me") signified mostly that he had not yet thought his way through to seeing himself as President...
...into the revolutionary politics of the Indian National Congress Party. And once he met Gandhi, the die was cast. Two men more diverse than Nehru and the frail little Mahatma could hardly be imagined. Devoted to the scientific socialism of the tractor and the big machine, Nehru could scarcely comprehend the distrust of machine civilization which Gandhi symbolized with his home spinning wheel, and he was outraged when Gandhi proclaimed a disastrous earthquake to be divine punishment for India's moral imperfections...
...best they could hope for. Sam Rayburn picked Arkansas' Democratic Representative Brooks Hays as the man to introduce an amendment seeking the $600 million. Hays got off to a staggering start. "I know that $600 million is a lot of money," he said plaintively. "I cannot even comprehend it." Then he recalled that he was supposed to be arguing for, not against, the amendment, and continued: "We are engaged in building a deterrent to war ... On that basis I appeal to the House to authorize a more generous amount...
...This freedom ceases to be a right and becomes a revocable privilege when the student or teacher loses truth as the end and substitutes mere expression of opinion. If human fulfillment, to which the academy is devoted, is to be realized, an immutable truth, observed as the mind may comprehend it and confirmed by conscience, must be recognized...