Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...third time, Russia is having to make a forced march to catch up." Any Hope? Not only Russia, but the World's other West-fearing civilizations -Islam, India, the Far East - have adopted Western technology and ideas in self-defense. But the World has accepted only the more trivial parts of Western civilization: it resolutely rejects Western religion and values. Here, Toynbee's readers get a new Toynbean equation, the Law of En counters: "When a traveling culture-ray is diffracted into its component strands ... by the resistance of a social body upon which it has impinged...
...self-justification is not the primary aim of this letter. We are chiefly concerned, rather, because TIME has encouraged its readers to dismiss as trivial and inconsequential a problem that is enormous and urgent. The evidence suggests that TIME borrowed its attitude from the Air Force. As we wrote in our series, the Lincoln report bypassed the Air Force, and was presented directly to the National Security Council and the White House. As we also stated, the air generals not only resent this "end run"; they also have a professional deformation on the subject of air defense. They say: "Offense...
...press conference that a committee appointed by the past Administration had submitted a report (Project Lincoln) which he had not studied in detail. No general conclusions, he said, had been reached on it in the National Security Council, the Cabinet or anywhere else. TIME does not dismiss as "trivial and inconsequential" the problem of defense and counterattack against Russia. But it does not hold that a group of scientists necessarily knows more about air defense than the military, nor does it believe that the U.S. will vanish from the face of the earth in two years unless it adopts Project...
...there are people who don't like Orwell. But it is hard to see how any one who neither fears facts nor considers truth trivial could help but find Such, Such Were the Joys an enriching volume...
...Books. Politically, says Orwell, he wrote "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." But where such a stand, in the case of another writer, might be trivial or tedious or pompous, Orwell made it into a passionate starting point from which to scourge all varieties of intellectual cant and hypocrisy. He denounced the Blimps who failed to see that Mussolini and Hitler were enemies of freedom, and he denounced the intellectuals who thought Stalin was any better. Much of his energy was devoted to carrying on a guerrilla campaign against the woolheaded fellow travelers who were poisoning English intellectual life...