Word: optimist
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...Says Optimist Vannevar Bush: "I believe I said '10 to 15%,' and didn't specify the generation interval. At 10% and 30 years per generation [Reader McSweeney] wins hands down. At 15% and 23 years, I was about right.† At 15% and 20 years, the result is over a billion billion, which is much worse...
Vannevar Bush, wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development-and an optimist who tries to grow potatoes among New Hampshire's rocks-tore into Osborn's gloomy theories. His main point: population increases, all right, but the world's living standard increases first. When "a lid is removed," both science and population burst upward, "but science gets there first." This is followed by a leveling off at a higher standard. "And thus," said Bush...
Despite these achievements, only the most unreasoning optimist could ignore the other face of West Germany's economy. West Germany still imports more than twice as much as it exports...
...optimist or a pessimist," announced Socialist Norman Thomas to a Kansas City audience. "I am a meliorist...
Churchill opened his address by tracing the course of world history during the first half of the twentieth century. He pointed to the confidence that marked its opening years, and said that while "on the whole I remain an optimist," mankind's failure to keep up with scientific progress has subjected it to terrible dangers. "The scale of events around (man) assumed gigantic proportions while he remained about the same size. By comparison therefore he actually became much smaller. . . . The need was to discipline an array of gigantic and turbulent facts. To this task we have certainly so far proved...