Word: dictums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...hence to destroy her more thoroughly than she could hope to destroy the U.S.-has been the ultimate deterrent to Russian military adventures. If the day of an ICBM standoff and of equal capacity for destruction is now dawning, new force will be given to Stalin's dictum to Roosevelt at Yalta: "Neither of us wants war, but our strength is that you fear it more." Protected-at least in their own mind-by the umbrella of U.S. fear, the Soviets might well succumb to the temptation to test American resolution with brushfire wars against the weaker, and more...
...Gawky Girl. The Royal Navy does not take kindly to pampered princelings. Tough instructors at Dartmouth went out of their way to prove the validity of Captain Bligh's legendary dictum that "a midshipman is the lowest form of life in the British Navy." But Phil the Greek (as he was sometimes called) weathered every storm. In two terms he received only one day's punishment, and might well have avoided a second rude admonition had it not been for a young lady who came to call...