Word: things
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...less an authority than Karl Marx asserted that the political order of a country derives from the economic relations among its citizens (although Adam Smith had figured out the same thing in the previous century). The leaders of the Russian and Chinese revolutions imposed on the people a totalitarian form of the social compact: You give up your freedom, and we'll make sure you live decently. Bread was one of the most common words on the banners that the workers carried through the streets of Petrograd in 1917, and the promise of food was an important theme...
...wrong. In all Communist societies, the principal purpose of the party -- and the only thing it does well -- has always been the preservation and enforcement of its own power. But that naked truth has traditionally been disguised with Marxist economics and ideology. To the extent that he de- Communized the economy and discredited ideology, Deng diminished the party's claim to legitimacy. He left the party all the more vulnerable to the flood of discontent that has so stunned the world in recent days. An improvement in living standards is not enough to meet the needs of the people...
...mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. 'If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a quitter.' I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave...
...Sandra, like most of Weldon's women, manages to wrest victory out of surrender. For one thing, she tells the story of her flight from boring respectability to middle-aged hedonism with bawdy, invigorating wit; silence may be her best defense in the presence of her new lover, but she is irrepressibly outspoken when she sets pen to paper. "Look, I'm really something, me," she tells herself. "And also I am nothing," she continues, in a characteristic about-face. "I am the debris of the world, product of a series of unconsidered and unnatural matings, between the proud...
...ambition that can be heard at the upper reaches of political power. But no, not a sound. It took considerable pushing and prodding to get him to enter politics at all. And when he did jump ( in, it was "accidents," he insists, that kept advancing his career. "The important thing," he says, "is to be prepared when an opportunity comes your...