Word: precept
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Admiral is a naval man and so not very literary. But once in a while he reads a book in the evening. His favorite is the military strategy of Sun Tzu, the Chinese Clausewitz. Sun Tzu's first precept is one that Kichisaburo Nomura especially relishes. Ironically, it is also often on the lips of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. Also-and this is why Admiral Nomura's hopeful mission seems doomed to failure-it is the unspoken precept of the U.S. State Department. The Admiral's translation...
...conclusion, the Second would probably have annihilated the numerically superior force it had faced. And it had done its job in a hurry, operating under a well-conceived plan. During the night some of its units had traveled better than 100 miles, blacked out. It had followed the precept of its able, profane commander, Major General George S. Patton Jr.: "Hold the enemy by the nose and kick him in the rump until he falls down" (an expurgated version...
...British Empire and from its allies. That great master of language, Winston Churchill, called the Lend-Lease Act "a new Magna Charta, which not only has regard to the rights and laws upon which a healthy and advancing civilization can alone be erected, but also proclaims, by precept and example, the duty of free men and free nations, wherever they may be, to share the responsibility and burden of enforcing them." Concluded Britain's Churchill: "In the name of His Majesty's Government ... I offer to the United States our gratitude for her inspiring act of faith...
...increasing its strength by a lack of voluntary enlistment and that we shall soon have WITHOUT CONSCRIPTION an army of more than 700,000 men for whom we shall not have the necessary equipment for many, many months), but is actually dangerous and violative of every American and constitutional precept and provision...
...serene wandering acrobat named Bobi settles for a couple of years among the farm people of a lonely plateau in Southern France. All he cares about is joy-in useless beauty, in the purity of animals. Carried away by his precept and example, the farmers reduce their planting to what they can eat, turn their animals loose, crowd their fallow land with narcissi, make friends with a stag and his doe. Having set up his earthly paradise, Giono regretfully proceeds in his closing chapters to knock it to pieces. He does so none too logically. Jean Giono has a genius...