Word: ago
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...century ago conservative Britons comforted themselves that their House of Lords was an anchor against the tempest of public opinion. A lord became a lord by appointment of the King, or by the happy chance of having a titled father. He owed nothing to any voter, and could afford (if he chose) to base his approach to any public matter on the dictum: "The public be damned...
...shiny, modernistic office building in Mexico City's Avenida Morelos, the men of the Department of Soil Conservation studied their maps, graphs and statistics, concluded that the chances were small that the Mexican land would feed its people well. Four hundred years ago Cortes had reported that the richness of Mexico was inexhaustible. Since then, the pine forests that held rain water on the mountain slopes have been cut away. The result has been drought. The Indians have lost their skill in terracing their fields, and their lands are gullied and eroded...
...Colonels' Revolution that overturned the corrupt, dictatorial regime of President Ramón Castillo, General Arturo Rawson had been one of the few devotees of democracy. For three days, five years ago, he had been President of Argentina. Rawson had passed quickly into history, a black-suited figure destined to spend his days amid the Jockey Club's splendors, while one of the obscure figures of the revolution, a man named Juan Domingo Perón, made the country over...
...nearly 20 years ago, Mildred Bailey lowered her mountainous bulk into her niece's tot-sized red rocking chair to pass the time of day with friend Hoagy Carmichael. When she tried to get up, the chair got up with her. Said Mildred with a laugh: "This ol' rockin' chair's got me, I guess." A month later, Composer Carmichael had finished the song that made Mildred famous...
...Twenty years ago, when the 200-inch telescope project came up before our group in New York, one of the trustees raised an objection . . . 'Aren't we acquiring more knowledge than we can assimilate?' . . . Obviously the difficulty lies in the fact that there is no way of foretelling what particular kind of knowledge is divertible to destructive ends . . . All knowledge has become dangerous. Indeed, knowledge has always been dangerous; for knowledge means power, and power can be used to degrade as well as to ennoble...