Word: barren
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...more than 1,000 years, the city stood empty in the barren, wind-blown valley, 34 miles northeast of where Mexico City now stands. Ever so slowly, its palaces and temples, splendid with brilliant murals and shell-thin pottery, disappeared beneath the sifting earth, until at last only a pair of massive, truncated pyramids and a few mounds remained to mark the city's grave. Even its name was forgotten...
...Germans dynamited 35% of the harbor facilities. But even under Nazi occupation, Rotterdam's businessmen met secretly and laid plans for the harbor's postwar expansion. At war's end, they invested all available money in the port, purposely leaving the main district a bombed-out, barren plain for five years. Rotterdam built steadily, has increased its prewar business...
...have a per capita income of $2,200, one of the world's highest. Kuwait collects almost no taxes, spends ten times more per capita than Britain on such welfare state services as medical care and education for its citizens. It has been transformed by oil from a barren land of mud huts into a booming oasis of commerce, where trees are planted as casually as corn and once-desert land on its capital's outskirts goes for $500 a square yard. Kuwait has a peculiar kind of problem: it has so much money stashed away that...
While optimistic about man's future, Philosopher William Ernest Hocking nevertheless sees the problem. "Corporate officialdoms," he says, "are helpless and barren?the parties, bureaus, departments, cabinets, commissions?barren because of the inner cancellation of each other's certitudes. The composite program, prudentially polished, has every virtue in it but life. Where there is no personal vision, the people perish." And the late Whitney Griswold put it thus: "Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring...
...thinker. A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or entirely subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinoza, with his barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of everything, on the other --neither philosopher owning any strict and systematic disciples today, each being to posterity a warning as well as a stimulus--show us that the only...