Word: panic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Threat. The commissioners were not panic-stricken; they were measured and matter-of-fact. But the U.S. was under definite threat, they said. They saw no hope that the United Nations would develop "in time" the authority to prevent another war. The threat, they reported, could be divided into two parts. The first was Phase I, which was the turbulent present, when the world at any moment could blunder into war. If war came in Phase I, it would come by accident, not from design. No potential enemy of the U.S. was yet prepared for war. The commissioners found...
...long run happier, freer, and more creative when they carry that ideal of a free society out into the world, than if they sit at home to hug it to themselves. ... I suspect that Americans will find initiative and action so much more to their taste than any panic-stricken waiting on what destiny may bring...
...instrument," much like a perfume atomizer. In wartime, the same technique might be applied by airplanes spraying disease as they now spray insecticides over truck farms. The raw materials of bacteriological warfare are easy to stockpile, and it is not really necessary to kill wholesale. Causing civilian panic should be fairly simple and adequate...
...lead and increase it. . . . New ideas require not only inspiration and perspiration but information. . . . It would be nothing short of a major national catastrophe if through lack of an informed public opinion America's atomic enterprise should drift into the doldrums, should fall prey to ignorance or panic or indifference or petty politics...
...others because they possess a "special nervous sensibility." This not only makes them extraordinarily receptive to inspiration, but the intervals between inspirations afflict them with a neurotic sense of "loneliness . . . failure and pathetic incompetence." When inspired, "almost all creative writers have at some moments of their lives been panic-stricken by the conviction that their imagination was getting the better of their reason. . . . The God visits them, not amicably, but in a flash of flame and fire." In Shakespeare's phrase: "Such tricks hath strong imagination...