Word: sooner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sooner or later there comes to every writer the two-thousand, three-thousand, five-thousand word lashing that doesn't just sting for the regulation seventy-two hours but rankles all his life. Zuckerman now had his: to reassure in his quotable storehouse till he died, the unkindest review of all, embedded indelibly (and just about as useful) as "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Annabel Lee," the first two poems he'd had to memorize for a high-school English class...
Perhaps the best assessment of President Kennedy is embodied in the signs carried by civil rights activists in 1962-63 reading MORE COURAGE, LESS PROFILE. Those placards referred to Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage. The sooner we accept the low estate of Kennedy's accomplishments, vision, courage and moral character, the faster we will stop deceiving ourselves...
...abiding, almost pious faith in the ability of that fragile, querulous species, humankind, to correct its deficiencies by the most radical process of all: thinking. In The Road to Wigan Pier he expressed the belief that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters." "Political chaos," he continued to stress, "is connected with the decay of language . . . one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." To that end, Orwell devoted his life. His work endures...
...Stalin had obscured massive crimes through the smokescreen of invective. He also warned, on the eve of World War II, that matters could deteriorate: "The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature,' which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature' is constant . . . The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion...
...thing we do know is that an empty M-16 couldn't have stopped the truck." In fact, during last week's almost identical attack on an Israeli military headquarters in southern Lebanon, an Israeli guard did shoot the driver, causing the truck to explode sooner than it otherwise might have-thus probably causing fewer casualties...