Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...modesty of Rosa Parks' example that sustains us. It is no less than the belief in the power of the individual, that cornerstone of the American Dream, that she inspires, along with the hope that all of us--even the least of us--could be that brave, that serenely human, when crunch time comes...
...Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal became the first human beings to conquer Mount Everest--Chomolungma, to its people--at 29,028 ft. the highest place on earth. By any rational standards, this was no big deal. Aircraft had long before flown over the summit, and within a few decades literally hundreds of other people from many nations would climb Everest too. And what is particularly remarkable, anyway, about getting to the top of a mountain...
...certainly wanted to get to the top for vocational reasons, but he also planned to deposit in the highest of all snows some offerings to the divinities that had long made Chomolungma sacred to his people. Hillary was by profession a beekeeper, and he would have been less than human if he had not occasionally thought, buckling his crampons, that reaching the summit would make him famous...
Harold Bloom, author of The American Religion, most recently published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human...
Performance at a high level in any sport is to exceed the ordinary human scale. But Pele's performance transcended that of the ordinary star by as much as the star exceeds ordinary performance. He scored an average of a goal in every international game he played--the equivalent of a baseball player's hitting a home run in every World Series game over 15 years. Between 1956 and 1974, Pele scored a total of 1,220 goals--not unlike hitting an average of 70 home runs every year for a decade and a half...