Word: abstaining
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...early 40's were, in philosophical implication, far closer to meetings protesting the arms race. In both cases the obvious danger was widespread destruction, the explicit question was war. But a man attending meetings of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies was ready to fight not abstain; it was clear what the government should do. Horrified by Nazi conquests, he knew that neutrality was an impossible position, that Lend-Lease was essential to prevent Europe from being altogether crushed. In this case, the desire was to lash out at a nation of criminals, not to refrain from...
...docked 1? for such delinquencies as being late to family prayers. From his Baptist mother. Laura Spelman Rockefeller, he absorbed a sense of piety and duty. Dancing, the theater, cardplay-ing and other frivolities were frowned on; at ten, young Rockefeller made a vow. which he never broke, to abstain from "tobacco, profanity and the drinking of any intoxicating beverages...
...seats and three independent ones, for a bare one-vote majority. Since so slim a margin would offer his government no protection against secret desertions by members of his own party in parliamentary voting, Fanfani planned to rely on Pietro Nenni's Socialists to agree at least to abstain from voting against a Fanfani government. While some Italians saw this as the long-discussed "opening to the left," which would take the Christian Democrats down the road to more statism, Social-Democrat Leader Saragat himself argued otherwise. Confronted with a clear choice of supporting a nonCommunist, pro-Western Socialist...
...fast [and] hold intercourse with them and eat and drink until the white thread becomes distinct to you from the black thread of the dawn." But all through the long daylight hours of Ramadan, the holy month in which the Koran was revealed to Mohammed, good Moslems must abstain from food and sex according to the most rigorous rules. Strict devotion to Ramadan lays a heavy burden on modern urban living: people became irritable and ineffectual on the job. Tunisia's up-to-date President Habib Bourguiba recently clamped down on the all-night nightclubs where celebrants make...
Just as the Christian Lent produced the custom of Mardi gras, so the Moslem fast of Ramadan, ninth and holiest month of the lunar calendar,* has long led to peculiar accommodations in Islamic countries. For 29 or 30 days every year, the devout, who must abstain from food, drink, tobacco and sex from dawn to sundown, make up for it by overindulging and undersleeping during the hours of darkness. When Ramadan, on its 32-year migration through the solar calendar, happens to fall in summer, many a weary Moslem gives up, sleeps the whole fasting day through. Tempers grow short...