Best 18th Century Quotes

#1. When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.

Claire Tomalin

#2. One layer was certainly 17th century. The 18th century in him is obvious. There was the 19th century, and a large slice, of course, of the 20th century; and another, curious layer which may possibly have been the 21st.

Clement Attlee

#3. The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.

Peter York

#4. I am a person of the 18th century.

Cecilia Bartoli

#5. I believe that justices must recognize that our Constitution is an 18th-century document that needs to be applied in the context of the 21st century.

Frank Lautenberg

#6. The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

Robert Darnton

#7. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age ... The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.

Hugo Black

#8. In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

Virginia Woolf

#9. Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century.

Paul Fry

#10. When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

Nicole Krauss

#11. The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.

Leslie Stephen

#12. To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost everything.

Joseph J. Ellis

#13. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.

Matthew Yglesias

#14. The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

Adam Savage

#15. What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

Lynne Truss

#16. I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.

Anna Freeman

#17. Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

Robert Wyatt

#18. If you go to old houses on Long Island you will see painted Chinese wallpaper, which was big in the 18th century. Throughout history, notable, established families have always tried to link to the 18th century.

Catherine Martin

#19. If the rise of European colonisation began in 18th century India, then the rallying cry of 'Jai Hind!' also signalled its end in 1947.

Pranab Mukherjee

#20. The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

John Keegan

#21. It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

Matthew Stewart

#22. Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.

Bernard Beckett

#23. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

Jonathan Sacks

#24. One legislator accused me of having a 19th century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law abiding citizens should be one of government's primary concerns.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#25. To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#26. German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

Pankaj Mishra

#27. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.

Ernst W. Mayr

#28. The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.

N. T. Wright

#29. When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn't told me.

James Fenton

#30. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

Michael Tippett