Word: took
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...political philosophy and approach to governance is rooted in Roosevelt's principles of progress. That's why one of the first things I did after I became President was make a pilgrimage to Hyde Park. And that's why when Prime Minister Tony Blair came to visit, I took him on a tour of the F.D.R. Memorial. Rather than cling to old abstractions or be driven by the iron laws of ideology, Roosevelt crafted innovations to the circumstances in which he found himself. He sought, above all, practical solutions that worked for people. He called his pragmatic method "bold, persistent...
...After a seven-year insurgency, this rebel defeated the ruling regime and took charge of a government that remains in power here 40 years later...
Harassed by the communist regime, the founder of the Solidarity labor union insisted, "We shall not yield to violence." He said his protests, which began in 1981, were "a historic opportunity for a peaceful evolution." In 1989, as the Soviet bloc wobbled, Solidarity took over the Prime Ministership; in 1990, Walesa became President...
...That it took hundreds of thousands of years to get from hand ax to ax with handle suggests that as of 50,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic, the social brain was not humming very vibrantly. There were only 2 million or 3 million "neurons"--a.k.a., people--scattered across the whole planet, and lacking fiber optics or even postal service, they weren't exactly in constant contact...
Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind of information-processing technology. By radically increasing the human population that a given acre could support, farming sped up the synergistic exchange of cultural information, lubricating innovation; it packed lots of neurons together, raising both the size and the efficiency of social brains...