Word: trivialities
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...object for which all this hardship and disease is being undergone seems trivial in the extreme. It will make the race of men no happier to know that somewhere in the tangle of tollage that is the Darien peninsula there really is a band of fair haired, thin lipped natives. Science will be little the wiser, and the sum total of human knowledge will not be appreciably increased. The real explanation for this and for all such expeditions is only partly scientific curiosity; it is much more the insatiable longing of a certain type of intellect to penetrate farther into...
...rate, foreign countries are experimenting with cotton growing. The British mill interests are encouraging it in Egypt and India. Argentina recently brought in an experimental crop of 120,000 bales?a trivial amount now compared with the huge American crop. Nevertheless the Argentines, flushed with their successful competition with our wheat growers, are becoming enthusiastic over the possibilities in Argentine cotton. Thus far the boll weevil has not appeared there, but the customary labor shortage is considered to preclude any very great cotton production in the Argentine, at least in the near future...
...Keep Your Hats On If You Like." And the Secretary explains with the comments "Let the men keep their hats on, as they invariably do in European galleries. We want to get them to show less respect for art and more understanding and liking for it." Whether this apparently trivial act will reform the American attitude is much to be doubted. But as William Penn's refusal to doff his beaver before His Majesty's judges testified to his intellectual freedom, so may the emancipated American of the future stand unawed--and hatted before a Titian...
...experiments in examination methods tried by Professors Lowes and Perry, designed to develop thought and original criticism rather than mere memorizing, seem almost trivial when contrasted with the brand new system of education established to years ago by Mr. Gurdjieff, at Fontainebleau and appropriately called an "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man." The principles upon which his method is based were acquired by Mr. Gurdjieff and others during thirty years of travel and study among the learned men of Persia, Tibet and India, where the seachers tried to supplement the knowledge of the West with the profound learning...
...group with somewhat the same qualifications, a maze of laws has been constructed which is impossible to respect if it is understood and still more impossible to obey if it is not understood. To make the situation a little worse, those laws which are commonly admitted to be irrational, trivial and ridiculous cease to be enforced: they remain law, enforceable at any time, while common sense prevents their invocation until they are forgotten, only to be hauled out for the confusion of succeeding generations...