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These were the months in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg was brooding in his Wardman Park1 apartment, making his historic pivot toward faith in the viability of international interdependence. Crouched in a London air raid shelter as German robot bombs rocked the ground overhead, he had asked his escort, “How can there be immunity or isolation when man can devise weapons like that?” Vandenberg broke the power of his party’s go-it-alone faction when he told a hushed Senate, “I have always been frankly one of those who believed in our own self-reliance. I still believe that we can never again—regardless of collaborations—allow our national defense to deteriorate to anything like a point of impotence. But I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action…. I want maximum American cooperation…. I want a new dignity and a new authority for international law. I think self-interest requires it.”
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
Amos found that notion absurd. The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. “The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.” The mind, when it dealt with uncertain situations, was like a Swiss Army knife. It was a good enough tool for most jobs required of it, but not exactly suited to anything—and certainly not fully “evolved.” “Listen to evolutionary psychologists long enough,” Amos said, “and you’ll stop believing in evolution.”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
The Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents.
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
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