Word: understand
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...National Socialism is the reassertion of the .strongest tradition in German and Prussian history-the belief in the all-powerful military state, creating order and discipline at home by ruthless Gestapo methods and expanding its wealth and power by ruthless conquest abroad. We have almost lost the capacity to understand that war and conquest can be regarded and preached as heroic and legitimate ends in themselves...
McLane was told, said he, of a plan to elect him international president of the Union of Hotel & Restaurant Employees (of which the bartenders' union is a local), with the understanding that, as president, he would also work for the mob. Testified McLane: "He [Nitti] said he made Browne," and Gangster Nitti gave McLane to understand he could "make" him. If he refused to run for the office, it was implied that he "would be found in an alley." McLane ran, secretly passed the word to his friends in the Federation not to vote...
...years, bald, parchment-faced, Austrian-born Composer Arnold Schönberg has written music so complicated that only he and a couple of other fellows understand what it is all about. This music, which sounds to the uninitiated not only queer but accidental, has been enjoyed by very few. But it has thrown the world of music into a Kilkenny cat fight. One cat camp maintains that Schönberg's music, like Einstein's theory, sounds queer because it is way over the average man's head; opponents swear that Schönberg is pulling everybody...
...pupil, Alban Berg. Stung by this new challenge, Krasner sent for Schönberg's piece and started in on it. For thankless months he sawed, plucked and stabbed away at its impossible chords and tuneless, jittery rhythms. "It was six months." said he, "before I began to understand it." But at the end of a year he had mastered this 30-minute-long chaos of caterwauling...
Russell's conclusion: "... I believe that, with sufficient caution, the properties of language may help us to understand the structure of the world." Presumably such teachings can debauch the young, for Russell notes: "This book would have formed the substance of my lectures at the College of the City of New York, if my appointment there had not been annulled...