Word: quit
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...Einstein staged his first great rebellion. Left behind in Munich when his family relocated to northern Italy after another of his father's business failures, he quit his prep school because of its militaristic bent, renounced his German citizenship and eventually entered the famed Zurich Polytechnic, Switzerland's M.I.T. There he fell in love with a classmate, a Serbian physics student named Mileva Maric. Afflicted with a limp and three years his senior, she was nonetheless a soul mate. He rhapsodized about physics and music with her, called her his Dolly and fathered her illegitimate child--a sickly girl...
...response to Germany's growing anti-Semitism, he became a passionate Zionist, yet he also expressed concern about the rights of Arabs in any Jewish state. Forced to quit Germany when the Nazis came to power, Einstein accepted an appointment at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a scholarly retreat largely created around him. (Asked what he thought he should be paid, Einstein, a financial innocent, suggested $3,000 a year. The hardheaded Elsa got that upped to $16,000.) Though occupied with his lonely struggle to unify gravity and electromagnetism in a single mathematical framework...
...other politicians pressed hard for nonviolent mass struggle against a Raj dangerously weakened by the threat of Japanese invasion. In 1942 Gandhi reluctantly endorsed the Quit India plan, calling on London for Indian independence "before dawn, if it could be had." He and the Congress leaders were arrested and jailed. Huge demonstrations soon flared into rioting and revolt. Mobs attacked any symbol of British power, and the disorder cut off British communications to its armies at the frontier. Government forces struck back hard, and nearly 1,000 Indians were killed before the uprising flamed out. Gandhi was finally freed...
...despaired that "my life's work seems to be over." Had liberty been won by the long years of peaceful and moral coercion or the violent spasm of Quit India? Resentment of Britain had been replaced by religious hatred. The killing before partition made it inevitable, and the slaughter afterward trampled on his appeals to tolerance and trust. All the village pilgrimages he made in 1946 and 1947 could not stop Muslims and Hindus from killing one another. All the famous fasts he undertook could not persuade them to live permanently in harmony. He blamed himself when Indians rejected...
...assistant once described the Wizard at work, "displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding." But behind his arcane dexterity lay Edison's exhaustive research and his tenacious unwillingness to quit tinkering until a technical challenge had been met. "Genius," he famously remarked, "is about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration." Or again, as he said in his autobiography, "There is no substitute for hard work...