Word: utopian
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...saying this, I do not mean to conjure up some grand utopian scheme of world government. The political differences are too great, the economic interests too divergent to make such visions realistic. Instead, it seems wiser to begin by making more determined efforts to build durable forms of cooperation for particular problems, however, where there are strong mutual interests in doing so. Such structures have served us well in the past. In the field armaments, the nonproliferation treaty has held the rate of nuclear diffusion to one-third the level that President Kennedy predicted in 1961. In commerce, the General...
...advantages of employing nature's weapons (and this list is not by any means complete) are almost utopian: low fuel costs, low maintenance expenses and best of all--self-propagation. And let us not forget that design changes and improvements will likely result within just a few short generations. Goodbye to cost overruns, gold-plating and spare parts scandals. Hello to smaller military budgets and employment for every biology and zoology major in the country...
Pierre Proudhon, the 19th century French utopian, once wrote of "the fecundity of the unexpected." It is always somewhat dangerous to think that history can be foretold by studying the patterns of the past. Still, the rhythms of change in the past century have displayed uncanny regularity. Schlesinger's theory, inherited in part from his father, is that people have absorbed their formative political values by the time they reach age 18 or so. Ronald Reagan reached that age during the years of Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait now hangs in the Cabinet room in the White House. John Kennedy came...
...older generation owe to young people not the fulfillment of dreams but honesty. We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive. We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not one-sidedly, without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance. From our own history we learn what man is capable of. For that reason we must not imagine that we are quite different and have become better. There is no ultimately achievable moral perfection. We have learned as human beings, and as human beings we remain in danger...
...genesis and development of abstract art," argues the show's curator, Maurice Tuchman, in an enormous catalog comprising essays by him and 19 other contributors, ". . . reflects a desire to express spiritual, utopian or metaphysical ideals that cannot be expressed in traditional pictorial terms." One typical preoccupation was with the idea that the universe, instead of being the vast agglomeration of distinct things perceived by science or realism, was a single, living entity, pervaded by "cosmic" energies; these revealed themselves in "vibrations," the formative agents of all material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles...