Word: vainly
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...critics point to his age as his greatest liability as a presidential candidate. They feel that he is pompous, vain and unapproachable, that even though he is a good Senator he would make a poor President because of his lack of administrative training. They feel that his conversion from isolationism came long after most men of intelligence had already made the change, that he is virtually blank on domestic affairs...
...Super State. Through the Panama conference in 1826 Bolivar had tried in vain to build a league against the despotism of the Old World. Sixty-three years later U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine headed the first modern Pan American conference in Washington, in hopes of building a hemispheric trade system based on a newly industrialized U.S. For all the oratory, nothing much happened until World War II turned the system into a virtual Good Neighbors' alliance. It had been Bogotá's job to make the wartime relationship permanent...
...Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Debussy might have made any of his elders envious. Second-chair critics, who attend dozens of recitals a year and stoically put up with a lot of willing but perfunctory performers, found themselves using first-chair words of praise. "One searches his memory in vain," wrote the New York Times's Noel Straus, "for another so richly endowed with all of the factors that make for extraordinary and completely satisfying piano playing...
...whole of our present conception of modern history.. . . Our present view of modern history focuses attention on the rise of our modern Western secular civilization as the latest great new event in the world. ... If we can bring ourselves to think of it, instead, as one of the vain repetitions of the Gentiles-an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Greeks and Romans did before us and did supremely well-then the greatest new event in the history of mankind will be seen to be a very different one. The greatest new event will then...
...vaudeville gag told of a conceited counterfeiter who came to grief because he could not resist putting his own picture in place of George Washington's. Osaka's aging, ailing Counterfeiter Kanji Ikeda and his wife Yoshino were not vain, but they did arrange the serial numbers on their fake bills to read as messages to the son whose death in the war had turned their life to misery and despair. One of the Arabic numbers-797,423-read aloud in Japanese, meant: "Don't cry, honorable elder...