Word: paradoxes
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JOURNEY THROUGH PARADOX...
...journey through China today is a journey through paradox. But no one can understand the paradoxes unless one keeps in mind the history behind them. The men who dominate China were, long ago, students and idealists. They became cruel as they fought and, as they governed, the logic of Communism drove them to further cruelty ?until they learned that absolute cruelty has its limits in absolute madness. What they are doing now is trying to untangle their old dreams from the madness those dreams begot...
...epicenter of the paradox lies in the everlasting clash of constraint (unlimited government control) with freedom (unlimited license to people). China's leadership knows that China cannot go forward without huge grants of initiative to its people. But the clash begins at the very bottom, in the danwei, the lowest-level building block of the party's control, which denies every grace of liberty to its members...
...baffling circumstance in last week's bizarre comeback story of a baseball bat that hit the losing home run. Wood is not a casual concern to ballplayers. Why a .353 hitter like Brett would lumber along with a Marvelous Marv Throneberry model (lifetime .237) is the sort of paradox that, scientists say, has trees talking to themselves. With two men out and one runner on base in the top of the ninth inning, the New York Yankees leading the Royals, 4-3, Brett took up his gooey cudgel and went out to meet Gossage...
...because a man dies for it"; "One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." George Bernard Shaw saw the aphorism as the new home for political slogans: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." His contemporary G.K. Chesterton was the last master of the paradox: "Silence is the unbearable repartee"; "A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition"; "Tradition is the democracy of the dead...