Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...complaint may not be partly sincere. The Russians fancy themselves as conquerors. Among their Allies in Tokyo they shoulder their way in and seize every opportunity to throw their weight around. Their own idea of victory, as revealed in areas where they are in occupation, is to make blunt demands at the point of a gun. But their method is not necessarily tougher or more effective than MacArthur's. He is using a policy much admired by Adolf Hitler, who was hardly a softie: making a demand which by itself does not seem to be worth resisting; after that...
Articulate, blunt Jim Forrestal has learned the ins & outs of Washington, since he arrived there five years ago, a quietly cynical man who had been invited by Franklin Roosevelt to become one of the six presidential assistants "with a passion for anonymity." Like F.D.R., he was born and raised in Dutchess County. And he was a Democrat. Right there the likeness ended. He had worked part of his way through Princeton, where his nose was broken in a boxing bout, worked for the Tobacco Products Corp. and sold bonds for Dillon, Read & Co. He had served in the Navy from...
...wage earner also needed encouragement. Said the Finance Minister: "Our present high personal income tax [is] discouraging work and initiative in all groups at a time when we need a rapid expansion of employment and a willing mobility of labor. . . . I recognize that . . . wartime taxation has begun to blunt incentives." Therefore, personal income taxes would be cut 16%, retroactive...
...British Government was torn between its moral obligation to the Jews and its material dependence on the Arabs in the Middle and Near East. Observed the London Times: "[This is] a conflict not of right with wrong, but of right with right." Prodded by President Truman's blunt request for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin conferred with Reuven Zaslani, chief of the Jewish Agency, and with the new Arab League's Secretary-General Abdel Rahman Azzam Bey. Afterward, both breathed fire. Said Zaslani: in the event of bloodshed, "the Jews...
...famed diatribe against Samuel Richardson's much-revered classic, Pamela, Henley insisted that it was Britain's mealy-mouthed writers, not her realists, who made "fornication [not] a detail (as it is in life)" but "the staple of the book." Readers were not accustomed to such blunt talk in the '80s, and under Henley's editorship, one magazine after another lost the bulk of its subscribers...