Word: one-tenth
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...rhetorical possibilities necessary for the expression of the deeper melodies of the spirit. But I have a grievance against nine-tenths of the new verse. To my mind this nine-tenths is not poetry but merely an oddity of expression and a grotesqueness of ideas. The test of any movement is the delivery of the goods', and nine-tenths of the new poets do not deliver the goods, they do not bring us poetry. But there is a one-tenth who have greatly enriched our treasury of poetry and to that one-tenth we owe eternal gratitude...
...most characteristic expression is the line down the side of a passage. Next comes "What does he mean?" in connection with a paragraph of such simplicity that one-tenth the reasoning power of a negro prizefighter could fathom...
...American public is not responding to the Second Liberty Loan to the extent asked by the Government. Of the sum of five billion dollars called for, only one-tenth has been subscribed in half the time allotted. Five billion seems a tremendous sum until we remember that only last February, England, with a population and a national wealth less than one half our own, and weakened by two and a half years of war, cheerfully subscribed to an even greater sum. The average American has not yet reached that point of patriotism where he will invest all his savings...
This is only the number of those who were ready to go without question and at once, according to the records. As the percentage of those who would go to war at the first call from a spirit of adventure is only about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of those who will willingly go when called upon (as the experience of England has shown) then we may count on four or six million men whose love of country, unlike their love of adventure, is superior to selfish motives of physical immunity...
Edison has repeatedly maintained that his success is principally the result of perseverance, and he declares that genius is "one-tenth inspiration and nineteenths perspiration." This view seems to be logical, but at the same time in direct contradiction to the theory that President Lowell has so often expounded. The latter declares that the world needs men who have the imagination to find new problems, and emphatically not the kind of men who can automatically solve any problem that is presented to them...