Epoch Quotes - Page 2

• Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

  George Orwell

  World, Slavery, May

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs.

  Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

  Art, Judging, Customs

  Letter to Sophie Brzeska-Savage Messiah By Harold Stanley (Jim) Ede, 1931.

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• Irrespective of todays judgment and the price we had to pay in this generation, we were able to close an epoch of divisions, different blocs and borders, opening the way for an era of globalization.

  Lech Walesa

  Division, Pay, Able

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• What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind

  C. Wright Mills

  Mean, Men, Keys

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.28, Oxford University Press

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• Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Bible, Biblical, Found

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Socialism - An Economic and Sociological Analysis: The Economist”, p.377, VM eBooks

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• Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Class, Clothes

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• Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Book, Men, History

  Thomas Carlyle (1846). “On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures ; Reported, with Emendations and Additions”

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• Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

  Pierre Boulez

  Musician, Needs, Useless

  "Éventuellement... (Possibly...)". Essay by Pierre Boulez (1952) published in his book "Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship" (p. 133), 1991.

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• Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Historical, Youth, Disturbed

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• We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.

  David Cronenberg

  Baby, Sex, Mean

  "Controversial visionary David Cronenberg sees technology, mankind, sexuality merging in 'eXistenZ'". Interview with Rob Blackwelder, splicedwire.com. April 14, 1999.

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• Yes, gentlemen, give me the map of any country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and the whole of its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora, its zoology, &c., and I pledge myself to tell you, a priori, what will be the quality of man in history:-not accidentally, but necessarily; not at any particular epoch, but in all; in short, -what idea he is called to represent.

  Victor Cousin

  Country, Men, Wind

  Victor Cousin (1832). “Introduction to the History of Philosophy”, p.240

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• Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Believe, Our World, Order

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• Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.

  Le Corbusier

  Eye, Style, Unhappiness

  Le Corbusier (2013). “Towards a New Architecture”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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• Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.

  Juan Ramon Jimenez

  Country, Character, Rights

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• We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Religious, World, Threshold

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• We should be most careful about retreating from the specific challenge of our age. We should be reluctant to turn our back upon the frontier of this epoch... We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand slow march of our intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

  James A. Michener

  Space, Our Generation, Challenges

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• The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired authorities, which was then beginning to absorb the energies of the Greek intellect, is the grandest movement in the profane annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy and far the better part of the political knowledge we possess.

  Lord Acton

  Philosophy, Light, Political

  Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom: Great Event”, p.7, VM eBooks

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• England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

  Karl Marx

  Idols, Skulls, Progress

  "The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853.

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• Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.

  Karl Marx

  Agitation, Bourgeoisie, Communist Manifesto

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1973). “Karl Marx on Society and Social Change: With Selections by Friedrich Engels”, p.76, University of Chicago Press

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• All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written, but by the spoken word.

  Adolf Hitler

  Events, Revolutionary, Spoken Word

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• When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Russia, Transition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Book, Zoologist, Changed

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• The discovery which has been pointed to by theory is always one of profound interest and importance, but it is usually the close and crown of a long and fruitful period, whereas the discovery which comes as a puzzle and surprise usually marks a fresh epoch and opens a new chapter in science.

  Oliver Lodge

  Science, Discovery, Long

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• When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth. We don't think about it, but it has a tremendous effect. But these are things you don't see right in front of your eyes. You need to think about them a little, to see what the consequences are. It's easy to put them aside, and the media don't talk about them.

  Noam Chomsky

  Eye, Thinking, Media

  Source: www.salon.com

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• Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Life, Clouds, Dust

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1888). “Longfellow's Days: The Longfellow Prose Birthday Book : Extracts from the Journals and Letters of H. W. Longfellow”

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