Word: meaningless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...talk about peace and the weapons of the spirit is meaningless unless we try in every way to embrace voluntary poverty and not work in any position, any job that contributes to war . . . We must give up our place in this world, sacrifice children, family . . . And we will be considered fools for Christ...
...shortest and best of the essays is by Roman Catholic Author Edward Ingram Watkin. The traditional Catholic criteria for determining when and whether a war is "just," says he, are meaningless under modern conditions. Only a nation's top leaders could possibly know enough of the facts to decide. But "the justice of the cause is not the sole criterion of justifiable war .'.. There is another test whose application is henceforth simple and plain: even a just war must not be waged by immoral means. Under modern conditions, however, war can be waged only by such aerial...
...soon drove him away from conversation and into the libraries which made a deeply read man of him. While normal hearers tussled with life's "general uproar," Edison came to love the state of "insulation" which enabled him to "think out my problems" in peace. And freedom from "meaningless sounds" steadily directed his ears to certain minutiae of sound that he could hear very well...
...history.. . . Our present view of modern history focuses attention on the rise of our modern Western secular civilization as the latest great new event in the world. ... If we can bring ourselves to think of it, instead, as one of the vain repetitions of the Gentiles-an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Greeks and Romans did before us and did supremely well-then the greatest new event in the history of mankind will be seen to be a very different one. The greatest new event will then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization...
Letters of recommendation in general and character references in particular are usually meaningless, and when an undergraduate has to ask an overworked professor, to whom he is scarcely known by name, for a letter of recommendation, the matter reaches a point of absurdity. Of course, the undergraduate can approach the problem more conscientiously and go to some section man he had two years before, or to his adviser or tutor. In most cases, however, if the instructor is still at Harvard, he has to refer to the student's official transcript, which the graduate school will have in any case...