Century Quotes - Page 25

• The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

  Bernard Bailyn

  Foundation, Inheritance, Social

  Bernard Bailyn (2017). “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition”, p.273, Harvard University Press

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• The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place.

  John Mearsheimer

  Powerful, Europe, Roots

  John J. Mearsheimer (2002). “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn't allow us to forget.

  Irena Sendler

  Holocaust, Half, World

  Irena Sendler's letter to the Polish Senate (2007), as quoted in "Irena Sendler: An Unsung Heroine" by Louis Bulow, www.auschwitz.dk. 2007.

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• The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Christian, Law, Belief

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• It is with men as with other things. The mullein needs only a year, but the oak a century, and the greatest men are those who have continued to grow as long as they have lived.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Men, Years, Long

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1900). “Tributes and miscellany”

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• Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable.

  Jean Gebser

  Reality, Justice, Understanding

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• The issue [Israeli-Palestinian conflict], already lasting more than half a century, has brought deep suffering to the Palestinian people and remains an important reason of extended turbulence in the Middle East region.

  Xi Jinping

  Issues, People, Suffering

  "China Rebukes Israel Ahead of Netanyahu Visit". edition.cnn.com. May 07, 2013.

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• Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much pubilicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the gratest Canada has produced in this century.

  Peter Brimelow

  Wise, Clever, Men

  Peter Brimelow (1988). “The patriot game: Canada and the Canadian question revisited”, Key Porter Books, [1988]

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• Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted.

  Otto Lilienthal

  Men, Years, Flying

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• The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth.

  Robert Wilson Lynd

  Christian, Stars, Children

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• Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

  Jack Vance

  Book, Fairy Tale, Tales

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• Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Spiritual, Respect, Confused

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• The acceptability of birth control has always depended on a morality that separates sex from reproduction. In the nineteenth century, when the birth control movement began, such a separation was widely considered immoral. The eventual widespread public acceptance of birth control required a major reorientation of sexual values.

  Linda Gordon

  Sex, Acceptance, Birth Control

  Linda Gordon (2002). “The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America”, p.1, University of Illinois Press

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• Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Hands, Fields, Damage

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 133), March 30, 1962.

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• Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century.

  Gianfranco Fini

  Leader, Political, Greatest Political

  Interview with Alberto Statera published in La Stampa, April 1994.

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• Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

  Jerry Fodor

  Mean, Differences, Views

  "Modularity of Mind". Book by Jerry Fodor, 1983.

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• These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.

  Robert Gilpin

  Character, Our World, Organization

  Robert Gilpin (2016). “The Political Economy of International Relations”, p.4, Princeton University Press

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• A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.

  Robert Gilpin

  Taken, Wealth, Increase

  Robert Gilpin (2016). “The Political Economy of International Relations”, p.100, Princeton University Press

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• Toward the end of his life, Gödel feared that he was being poisoned, and he starved himself to death. His theorem is one of the most extraordinary results in mathematics, or in any intellectual field in this century. If ever potential mental instability is detectable by genetic analysis, an embryo of someone with Kurt Gödel's gifts might be aborted.

  Brian L. Silver

  Intellectual, Analysis, Might

  Brian L. Silver (2000). “The Ascent of Science”, p.506, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Wise, Sick, Alex

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• The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

  Johann Hari

  Real, Class, World

  "Britain - a caste society?". JohannHari.com, January 29, 2006.

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• The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.

  Harold Innis

  Religious, War, Communication

  Harold Innis (1999). “The Bias of Communication”, p.67, University of Toronto Press

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• A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!

  M. R. James

  Ghost Stories, May, Succeed

  M. R. James (1987). “Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories”, p.647, Oxford Paperbacks

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• There will always be people like me, who believe that to ripple the pages of a printed book is a special experience, one that through the centuries has taken millions from the darkness into the light.

  Quintin Jardine

  Believe, Book, Taken

  "The Kindle threat". Quintin Jardine's blog, September 29, 2010.

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• All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Adoption, Greek, Six

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. IV, From manuscript To Print, p. 39, 1949.

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