Word: imperfections
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...social reality. Most Americans lived in cities, and the myth of the West was just that: a myth, however durable. The real frontier was urban--a place of hitherto unimagined overcrowding, of cultural collision enforced by huge-scale immigration, of rapid change, where class ground against class like the imperfect rollers of a giant machine. Its epitome was New York City--Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as the writer O. Henry called it--a city in convulsive and continuous transition, bursting at the seams with high spirits, misery and spectacle...
...task of introducing Western democracy, imperfect as it is, is going to take a long time. If you are expecting a tumultuous revolution to change it all, you are wrong again. All revolutions in China, as shown by history, have to be led by and fight for the peasants, with the top priority placed on economic aspects like equality, but never on freedom. Mao Zedong's seemingly impossible victory against the Nationalists and the U.S. is one of the many examples that quickly come to mind...
...record is impressive. The progress, however imperfect, is inspiring. That progress must be sustained and strengthened. To change course now would be to turn aside from many decades of difficult but steady hope and fulfillment, in order to follow pathways far less bright, and far less full of promise...
...Imperfect, the debate over the balanced budget serves as one of the great tests of America's national spirit. In the past we have always passed these tests. When Great Britain sought to impose taxation without representation on the 13 colonies thousands of men came forward to help carve out a new nation committed to freedom and democracy...
...never has been and it never will be. But unless I am gravely mistaken, good manners and perfect unity were not mentioned by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 as a prerequisite for independent nationhood. I have yet to be informed of a universal association of national standardization which ensures that imperfect countries are closed down and sold to the highest bidder...