Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...clear that until quite recently any legal judgment against a warmaker would have been absurd. Throughout the centuries the choice between war and peace remained entirely in the hands of each sovereign state and neither the law nor the ordinary conscience of humanity ventured to deny that right. For the loser in a war, punishment was certain. But this was not a matter of law; it was simply a matter of course." In the wake of World War I, however, he continued, repeated efforts were made to outlaw war, "reaching their climax in the Kellogg-Briand Pact...
This inwardness of all truth-giving experience, far from bridging the breach between man and God, widened that breach, for Kierkegaard: man, he felt, is so completely other than God that the Christian doctrine of God's incarnation in human form is nothing less than "absurd." To believe this magnificent absurdity God has provided man with the gift of faith, and only by faith-never by intellect or learning-can man believe...
...Absurd as it is, the opera contains some of Mozart's most brilliant, buoyant, vocal music. But in the huge Metropolitan, the slight comedy was as close to lost as a puppet show in Madison Square Garden. One of the principals, Dezso Ernster, the Met's new basso, spoke and sang English with a Hungarian accent so thick he could not be understood. Most of the others went at Mozart's trifle like a man swinging at thistledown with a baseball bat. Somewhere along the line someone had forgotten that Mozart's little Singspiel...
...whole absurd panoply of totalitarianism is on display. . . . The multitudes of gaudy uniforms . . . soldiers with red tassels dangling from their overseas caps; the snappy, booted, armed police, with their short clubs strapped to their belts; the civil guard, in their odd tricorn hats; the municipal police in blue, the special border police in green . . . poker-faced plain-clothes men flashing their badges and demanding identification papers...
...George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, Robert J. Watt, International Representative of A.F.L., Senator Elbert Thomas, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, and Ewing Cockrell, New York attorney, in a statement last week also called for universal disarmament, denounced as absurd international machinery designed to prevent only atomic armaments...