Early Modern Quotes

#1. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

Michael Dirda

#2. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.

Brad S. Gregory

#3. In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

Jill Lepore

#4. The idea that somehow people of African descent are not part of the same species as whites was accepted by European men of science in the early modern period.

Manisha Sinha

#5. Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.

Matthew Stewart

#6. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Robert Stone

#7. Most of the early modern scientists were Christians; they believed that matter was *not* preexisting, but had come from the hand of God. Thus, it had no power to resist His will but would obey he rules He had laid down- with mathematical precision.

Nancy Pearcey

#8. As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table.

Steven Pinker

#9. At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.

Yuval Noah Harari

#10. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

Karen Armstrong

#11. Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.

Matthew Stewart

#12. Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.

Peter Lewis Allen

#13. We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.

Richard Leakey

#14. I guess I've always been really attracted to period pieces and always felt visually I was probably more made for the '50s or the early '60s than I am for a modern day.

Carla Gugino

#15. most of its existence, Mussolini's regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler's racism - probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.

Tom Reiss

#16. Progressive policies implemented since the early 1900s launched America into the modern age and created a vibrant middle class.

Keith Ellison

#17. The Olympic stadium may have been built only in the early 1970s but it was clear for a long time it had no future. For many reasons it is not good enough for modern football and today's fans.

Franz Beckenbauer

#18. Early to bed and early to rise, and you'll meet very few of the best people.

George Ade

#19. As unwieldy as those early computers were, there was an aura surrounding them. They were perceived as magical; their operators, as wizards of the modern age endowed with extraordinary scientific prowess.

Ross Parry

#20. Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.

Sebastian Junger

#21. Our New Testament text of today is a reconstructed or restored text. It has been reconstructed by modern scholarship from three independent lines of witnesses: the manuscripts, the versions, and the writings of early Christians (Church Fathers). In

Neil R. Lightfoot

#22. I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.

Ellen McLaughlin

#23. Incidentally, although the Cistercians did much to improve the quality of sheep, the animal remained much smaller than its modern descendants; as late as the early eighteenth century a sheep wasn't much bulkier than a Labrador Dog.

Clarissa Dickson Wright

#24. Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

Jerry Saltz

#25. The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

#26. From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.

Kim Young-ha

#27. I now resolved to go to bed early, with a firm purpose of also rising early the next day to revisit this charming walk; for I thought to myself, I have now seen this temple of the modern world imperfectly; I have seen it only by moonlight.

Karl Philipp Moritz

#28. Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in the modern sense, a bird.

Alan Feduccia

#29. The early settlers amazed her
they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.

Jennifer Vanderbes

#30. In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)

Joseph Reese Strayer

#31. A small child from a developing country has the advantage, from a very early age, of having access to toys which structure his mind, which constitute a sure advantage over the little African child who has never even held a modern toy.

Abdoulaye Wade

#32. Bringing Israel and modern Zionism into the subject of the Holocaust is to bring current (i.e. late 20th and early 21st Century) issues into a historical event that occurred on another continent altogether in the early-mid 20th Century.

James Morcan

#33. Heresy no longer existed within religion; it
was founded in the state.

Reinhart Koselleck

#34. Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

Edmund Phelps

#35. The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

Robert Gottlieb

#36. This is how early age people heard music, not through their ears above the cacophony of modern life but directly from the universe into their souls.

Bryan Islip

#37. I'm never going to be a modern gal. I love colonial. I love early American. I love a big rectangular piece of brown furniture on a hardwood floor.

Emily Procter

#38. When the new wave of terrorism came on the modern world, which is the late 1960s, early 1970s, I think we spent about a decade, the United States and our allies, trying to figure out how to deal with it.

Paul Bremer

#39. The early Celts lived in an enormous region, stretching from modern Turkey through eastern and central Europe (including much of modern day Switzerland, Austria, Germany and northern Italy), and westwards and northwards into much of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Britain and Ireland.

Sharon Paice MacLeod

#40. Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories.

Raymond Louis Wilder

#41. If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia,[85] they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.

Craig S. Keener