Word: foolish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Foolish Questions. "Every single generalization respecting mathematical physics which I was taught [at Trinity College, Cambridge]," he notes, "has now been abandoned. . . ." But Whitehead, who has seen science and philosophy adopt and then discard one "certainty" after another, remains undismayed: "The history of thought is largely concerned with the records of clear-headed men insisting that they at last have discovered some clear, adequately expressed, indubitable truths." Whitehead considers "inconsistent truths [as] seedbeds of suggestiveness," thinks (with his philosophical parent Plato) that "knowledge is a process," and that "ancient science stopped with Archimedes [because] people stopped asking foolish questions...
...people of Paris," wrote François Rabelais in the 16th Century, "are so foolish by nature that a juggler, a pardon-peddler, a mule with bells . . . will gather a bigger crowd than a good evangelic preacher ever could." Four centuries later, between 1920 and 1935, Parisian jugglers and pardon-peddlers were gathering one of the biggest, strangest crowds in French history-a throng of U.S. expatriates, fleeing the New World of Harding, Coolidge, and their own disconsolate selves. Says Samuel Putnam, who went to Paris in 1926 to translate the works of Rabelais, and stayed seven years, writing sometimes...
Then up stepped New York Financial Consultant John W. Hanes, onetime Under Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt, and chairman of the Tax Foundation, a big-business tax-research group. Witness Hanes declared that present tax laws added up to "foolish and dangerous discrimination against those with managerial ability." Pooh-poohing Government figures, he declared that the Treasury surplus would be large enough to enable the U.S. to have substantial tax cuts and substantial debt reduction, too. What Congress had to do, said Hanes, was to cut federal spending...
Under the circumstances, Langer argues, the U.S. would have been foolish to withdraw in a high-minded huff merely out of distaste for Darlans and Lavals. Langer says that Vichy's North African governor, General Maxime Weygand, "was just as intent as we on excluding the Germans from North Africa and blocking any program of collaboration." Nine months before the U.S. went to war with Germany, the U.S. agreed to ship Weygand limited supplies of coal, sugar, tea, etc. In return, Weygand let U.S. vice consuls work with French Resistance leaders and report in cipher to Washington. In this...
...obvious result from this short-sightedness is another upward twist in a price spiral already reaching dangerous levels. Most American firms enjoyed fat profits from their 1946 operations. Unions know this almost as well as management, and they would be foolish indeed if they did not take full advantage of it in setting their demands for the coming year. With bargaining power reduced by incontrovertible facts, new highs in labor's terms can be avoided only by the slim margin of union moderation, at a time when unionists are bearing the brunt of a greatly increased cost of living. Labor...