Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Newton is the man of the century for this reason: by imagining--and proving--a rational universe, he in effect redesigned the human mind. Newton gave it not only intellectual tools undreamed of before, but with them, unprecedented self-confidence and ambition. If Shakespeare incomparably enlarged humanity's conception of itself, Newton--working later, in the turmoil of the English civil war and Restoration--set in place those cooler universals that were the premise of the 18th century's Age of Reason and the dynamic of the 19th century's age of revolutions--industrial, political and social...
...truths that Jefferson famously declared to be "self-evident" were not new. He drew his ideas from an extraordinarily wide range of reading, especially from the works of Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, and from the Scottish moral philosophers--Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam Smith...
...work of a life may transcend the biography; a civilized person, the slave-owning hypocrite--or whatever he may have been beneath the impenetrable enamels of his character--formulated, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding aspiration of America and what is still its best self, an ideal that retains its motive force precisely because it is unfulfilled and maybe unfulfillable: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and evil were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls...
...after India agreed to hand over three high-profile Kashmiri separatist prisoners. New Delhi?s decision to reverse its no-concessions-to-terrorism policy reflected mounting domestic pressure to resolve the standoff at the same time as Afghanistan?s Taliban rulers tied India?s hands. "There were threats of self-immolation by relatives of the hostages in India and it became very difficult for the government to hold out," says TIME New Delhi correspondent Maseeh Rahman. "But once the Taliban refused to allow Indian commandos to storm the plane, India may have had little option...