Word: reading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When our children's children read the story of the 20th century, they will see that above all, it is the story of freedom's triumph: the victory of democracy over fascism and totalitarianism; of free enterprise over command economies; of tolerance over bigotry. And they will see that the embodiment of that triumph, the driving force behind it, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
While studying in England to be a lawyer, he first read the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu religious poem that became his "spiritual dictionary." For Gandhi, the epic was a clarion call to the soul to undertake the battle of righteousness. It taught him to renounce personal desires not by withdrawal from the world but by devotion to the service of his fellow man. In the Christian New Testament he found the stirrings of passive resistance in the words of the Sermon on the Mount...
Before print, the ability to read was useful mainly to the elite and the trained scribes who handled their affairs. Affordable books made literacy a crucial skill and an unprecedented means of social advancement to those who acquired it. Established hierarchies began to crumble. Books were the world's first mass-produced items. But most important of all, printing proved to be the greatest extension of human consciousness ever created. It isn't over: the 500-year-old information revolution continues on the internet. And thanks to a German printer who wanted a more efficient way to do business...
...candy and newspaper salesman on the Grand Trunk Railway. By the time he was 16, he had learned telegraphy and began working as an operator at various points in the Middle West; in 1868 he joined the Boston office of Western Union. It was here that he read Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity and decided to work full-time as an inventor...
Standing in an unstable universe where distances contract and clocks slow down, and time and space are plastic, Albert Einstein cast a wistful backward glance at Isaac Newton. "Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science!" he wrote. "Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort...