Word: dictum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Madame Glyn's day, sober and cautious men wearing double-breasted suits and tasteful ties have paid huge bucks to production executives they thought could realize this dream for them. Such men don't read novels. If they did, they would be familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum: "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads...
Fitzgerald romanticized the business (as he did everything else) and so vastly exaggerated his census of production genius. Another writer, William Goldman, author and fixer of many a screenplay, came closer to the true figure, which is zip. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, he wrote, putting his dictum in capital letters in the vain hope that people would pay serious attention...
Ending all ties would be a symbol of Harvard's stand against discrimination. Symbols are fine--they are often very powerful. But a symbol must obey the dictum "do no harm." Cutting all ties would do much harm...
...Silvio Berlusconi, himself elected in reaction to the shadiness of his predecessors. If scandal brings down his government any time soon, Berlusconi's will take its place among a long series of famously short-lived postwar governments in Italy, where the citizenry certainly take to heart Thomas Jefferson's dictum "that government governs best which governs least...
However, the one thing that has changed, over and over again, is the American policy towards these refugees. The Bush administration held to a strict deportation policy without the benefit of asylum hearings; candidate Clinton attacked this dictum as both "immoral" and "illegal" throughout the campaign. In January 1993, President Clinton proclaimed that he would temporarily continue the Bush policy until an "acceptable" alternative is found. In June of the same year, Clinton announced economic sanctions would be imposed on the Haitian regime...