Word: surest
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...open hand, outstretched to a fallen adversary, may be the surest sign that a battle is truly over. Last week brought just such a sign as the Soviet government issued a dignified -- but desperate -- request for help, and an American President responded solicitously. George Bush's decision to help sustain the Soviet Union through the hard winter ahead reflected as much politics as pity, but what made it easy was that both sides had so much to gain...
...school or law school are going to be interrupted. We can talk disinterestedly about the merits or follies of Bush's gulf policy as long as we do not have to go to war. Bush undoubtedly realizes that putting middle-class lives on the line is the surest way to provoke a political backlash against his Gulf policy; that's why, realistically, the draft is unlikely...
When wave after wave of newly homeless people rolled through the cities, emergency shelters seemed the surest and quickest way to get them off the streets. So most of the money allocated by Congress and by states went toward emergency, rather than preventive, care. Only rarely was there money for rental assistance, tenant-landlord mediation or short-term crisis loans to help the near homeless keep the roofs over their heads. Public money paid slumlords $2,000 a month to put up families in "welfare hotels." But this did nothing to ease the families' desperation, fight their addictions or restore...
...wine-country joke has it that the surest way to turn a large fortune into a small one is to buy a vineyard. Perhaps so, but there seems to be an endless supply of multimillionaires whose ideal of a little place in the country is a boutique winery on Napa County's Howell Mountain or Rutherford Bench. Twenty-five years ago, the county had a scant two dozen wineries; today there are more than 200, and about a dozen more are on the drawing boards...
...motive is most basic. Aggressive behavior is rewarded whether or not it is innate to the human psyche. Shortages of resources are habitually taken as occasions for armed offensives, rather than for hard thought and innovation. And war, to a warrior people, is of course the highest adventure, the surest antidote to malaise, the endlessly repeated theme of legend, song, religious myth and personal quest for meaning. It is how men die and what they find to live...