Word: fines
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...example, the code of the Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna in the early second millennium B.C., developed a century before the more famous code of Hammurabi, left no doubt what would happen if you punched a man in the face: a fine of 10 shekels of silver (a bargain compared with the levy for biting off his nose, which would cost 60). As long as people could go about their business without fear of getting their noses bitten off, the social brain could productively throb...
Little is known of the life and development of Giotto di Bondone, born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription...
Alas, indignant--or prurient--revisionism does not work with a fine pencil. Thomas Jefferson amounted to something infinitely more important--and more interesting--than one would know from the noise and scandal obscuring his achievement...
What does it mean to be a Jeffersonian? You must pick your Jefferson. Every other American statesman, Henry Adams wrote, could be portrayed "with a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of semitransparent shadows...
...well, that strength still came at a terrible cost. "How much happier a world it would be if one did not have to mount crusades against racism, segregation, a Holocaust, the extermination of 'inferior peoples,'" notes presidential historian Robert Dallek. "We don't need evil. We'd do fine without Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Think of the amount of money and energy used in World War II--if only they could have been used in constructive ways. Good doesn't need evil. We'd be just as well...