United States or South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Just as the ignorant and fitful curiosity of some little monkey is hardly to be compared to the astronomer's magnificent search, so the craft and cunning we see in our pussies would bear small relation to the high-minded planning of some ruler of the race we are imagining. And yet craft /is/ self-defeating in the end.
In the light of this report, there are two things I believe we should keep constantly in mind. The first is that each of our great river valleys should be considered as a whole. Piecemeal operations within each lesser drainage area can be self-defeating or, at the very least, needlessly expensive.
Both are being held back from reaching their full potential: Russia by the legacy of communism, economic turmoil, a cruel and self-defeating war in Chechnya; China by the illusion that it can buy stability at the expense of freedom.
And finally, there are no doubt some who would prefer to put off a tax cut in the hope that ultimately an end to the cold war would make possible an equivalent cut in expenditures but that end is not in view and to wait for it would be costly and self-defeating.
Those who, in eagerness to cultivate their pupils' minds, are reckless of their bodies, do not remember that success in the world depends more on energy than on information; and that a policy which in cramming with information undermines energy, is self-defeating.
Despite the inevitable pressures that build up when the world economy suffers from high unemployment, we must firmly resist the demands for self-defeating protectionism. But free trade must also be fair trade. And I am determined to protect American industry and American workers against foreign trade practices which are unfair or illegal.
Swift, criticising the manners of his day, says "Wise men are often more uneasy at the over-civility of these refiners than they could possibly be in the conversation of peasants and mechanics." But it is not only in these details that the self-defeating action of our arrangements is traceable: it is traceable in the very substance and nature of them.
That I have done so has not been from forgetfulness, but because I have, with vain and self-defeating prudence, sought for cheerful words to convey sad thoughts. Paralus breathes and moves, but is apparently unconscious of existence in this world. He is silent and abstracted, like one just returned from the cave of Trophonius.
And finally, there are no doubt some who would prefer to put off a tax cut in the hope that ultimately an end to the cold war would make possible an equivalent cut in expenditures but that end is not in view and to wait for it would be costly and self-defeating.
"Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"
Word Of The Day