Word: needlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This reader feels his isolated self-personification more or less inadequate to the occasion of life prior to death, and he seeks purgation in books. But needless to say, he who cannot live with himself does not find is easier to live with another. Rather than submit to a book, he steels himself against it, with alcohol, or inattention, or self-consciousness...
Speaking in the Vatican palace to the Italian League Against Excessive Noise, Pope Pius XII pleased his listeners by roundly condemning needless decibels. Said His Holiness: "Silence is beneficial not only to sanity, nervous equilibrium and intellectual labor but also helps man to live a life that reaches to the depths and the heights ... It definitely helps an effort toward an interior life, and it is in silence that God's mysterious voice is best heard...
...Eisenhower Administration's security record has more significant failings than its political shenanigans, and its needless damage to lives and careers. More important are the profound effects that security-consciousness has had on the public mind. It is still too early to asses the popular conception of freedom that has emerged from the assaults of Senator McCarthy. It is too early also to examine the damage to government morale and effectiveness stemming from unimpeded Congressional investigations and loyalty requirements that place a premium on mediocrity. But it is alarmingly clear that, as government work becomes less attractive, applications for career...
...increases with old-fashioned-X-ray machines and inexperienced operators. The sensible conclusion is that patients would be foolish to forgo needed X rays, especially when given by a doctor or dentist who knows his business and his dosages, and would be still more foolish to expose themselves to needless X rays...
Amid all his other problems, Charlie Wilson chose last week to surpass himself in the art of getting into needless trouble over an essentially trivial matter. From the Defense Secretary's office came an order requiring military officers with Washington desk jobs to wear civilian clothes to work. Ignoring officers' complaints that they would have to spend substantial sums of their own money for such clothes, Wilson airily explained to newsmen: "We don't think at the seat of Government it is a good thing to put on the military...