Word: understood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...person wanting to be understood as commonsensible and undoctrinaire will describe himself or herself complacently as middle-of-the-road. So loosely defined a term, as with the similar pride in being an "independent voter," invites a lot of freeloaders. The middle is thus the natural hiding place for the uninvolved. It includes in its domain hordes of the indifferent, who call themselves tolerant, and of the uncaring, who think themselves pragmatic and flexible. Such people are apt to congratulate themselves on being superior to those who strive, who get worked up, who agitate for causes, who make demands...
...might well find himself saying something like "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." There was never all that much wrong with Goldwater's famous formulation, except that in the climate of 1964 this wordplay was correctly understood as a winking endorsement of right-wing extremism...
...talks with Kissinger have been indispensable to reporters in an otherwise hostile Administration. Yet sometimes a Kissinger briefing edges closer to what is known in White House parlance as "stroking." During the Viet Nam War, for example, Kissinger would tell Hawkish Columnist Joseph Alsop that the North Vietnamese understood only force, and Eastern Liberal James Reston that he was straining to keep the Pentagon hawks at bay. Aboard his Air Force 707 on an early round of his Middle East peace shuttle, Kissinger would shuffle to the press cabin in the rear to tell the 14 reporters in his entourage...
...cannibalized by Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and other European artists, becoming a font of style for cubism and expressionism. This helped Europeans see it as "real" art, instead of mere curios or portable anthropological data. Still, the stereotype must be got rid of before African art can be understood in relation to its original audience...
...alone. He knew that. Others had realized it long ago; Kesey in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Pynchon in "V," Heller in "Catch-22." He had friends, people who took his side. He felt a common bond, even with the people he had never met. They, too, understood...