Word: dictum
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Noting the signs and wondering how long Khrushchev dared avoid "tidying up" his internal situation, Columnist Joseph Alsop last week quoted a recent dictum of that old student of the Soviet system, former Ambassador George Kennan: "In the Soviet Union today there are just too damned many people who have been left unmurdered...
...fatal conclusion. Brando, his hair bleached for the occasion, plays a sensitive German lieutenant who hates killing, but justifies it as the only way to bring lasting peace to Europe. He resists the attempts of his superior officer (Maximilian Schell) to make him "a creative soldier"; resists the military dictum that "when you become a soldier you contract for killing in all its forms"; resists the friend who tells him that despite all the corpses "nothing really changes"; resists the Frenchwoman (Liliane Montevecchi) who pleads with him to desert because "there never was anything for you to fight for"; resists...
Handing down one of the basic decisions of U.S. constitutional law, the Supreme Court ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland, back in 1819, that the Constitution exempts the Federal Government from state taxation. Setting forth his renowned dictum that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy," Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the states (and, by inference, local governments) "have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress...
Heaven or the Other Place. As a writer, he declined in the last years of his life. In The Virginians, Lovel the Widower and Philip he merely demonstrated the half-truth of a later dictum that "all authors are musical-boxes which play a limited number of tunes." And yet. at the time of his death he was, like Dickens with Edwin Drood and Stevenson with Weir of Hermiston, midway through what remained a brilliant fragment-Denis Duval, Dickens considered it "the best of all his works...
With the dizzying growth of science and technology in the 20th century, Philosopher Francis Bacon's 16th-century dictum that knowledge is power has come fully and prophetically true. Advances in abstract scientific theory can promise or threaten next year's breakthroughs in the technology of national power. And on the sidelines of the science-technology race, the backward nations, eager for progress and wary of winding up in the loser's camp, watch intently to see how Russia fares in competition with the West...