Top 100 Eighteenth Century Quotes
#1. In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.
Ralph Adams Cram
#2. Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.
Heinrich Heine
#3. The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist ...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#4. In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.
Corita Kent
#5. I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.
Sylvester Stallone
#6. The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them.
Ibn Warraq
#7. Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.
William McKinley
#8. Take up something that you know will never bring you any returns except pleasure-in other words, allow yourself to live the way brilliant eighteenth century courtesans lived. Don't be afraid of having a decorative life, even if all the decorations come from you.
Perry Brass
#9. She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.
Nella Larsen
#10. It was in the eighteenth century that England became what (Adam) Smith called "a nation of shopkeepers" ... (p. 58)
Jerry Z. Muller
#11. It was a strange experience to be looking out the window of an eighteenth-century Chinese house at a seventeenth-century colonial graveyard full of people in twenty-first-century Halloween costumes. Salem, guys.
J.W. Ocker
#12. 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
#13. Eighteenth-century matrons would have never have dreamed of appointing a redhaired wet nurse for their precious offspring - redheads passed on their horrible characters through their milk.
Kate Williams
#14. After one of his [Hubert Humphrey] long-winded harangues I suggested he had probably been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. He responded by saying that I would have been a great success in the movies working for Eighteenth Century-Fox.
Barry Goldwater
#15. Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century.
Alan J. Heeger
#16. Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The
Tom Reiss
#17. One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.
Jill Lepore
#18. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
Edgar Meyer
#19. I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.
Anatole France
#20. Black Jack. A common name for rogues and scoundrels in the eighteenth century. A staple of romantic fiction, the name conjured up charming highwaymen, dashing blades in plumed hats. The reality waled at my side.
Diana Gabaldon
#21. In the early eighteenth century, India owned 25% of the world's wealth.
Firas Alkhateeb
#22. In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.
Mark Kurlansky
#23. It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
Gore Vidal
#24. Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of war. During most of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to Europeans to abandon their travels in a foreign country which their own was fighting.
Murray N. Rothbard
#25. Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century.
Edmund Morgan
#26. So I sat on the grimy floor of an eighteenth-century corn mill and watched my fiance heal the guy I loved.
"Wow," I muttered. "I'm gonna have one messed-up 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' essay when I get back to Hex Hall.
Rachel Hawkins
#27. The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science.
James M. Buchanan
#28. The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It's impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.
Florence King
#29. You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There's a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that's really fairly recent," he added thoughtfully.
Diana Gabaldon
#30. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.
Ralph Adams Cram
#31. Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century.
Tom Turner
#32. In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.
Karen Armstrong
#33. The Maze, that labyrinth of alleys called ginnels and snickets locally - tiny squares, courtyards, nooks and crannies and small warehouses that had remained unchanged since the eighteenth century.
Peter Robinson
#34. I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.
Lauren Willig
#35. Maybe he just didn't know how to ask nicely. No. Belle shook her head. She had read about this. The victims of kidnapping often wound up sympathizing with the perpetrator. It was a sickness, a very scientifically predictable one. This was the eighteenth century. The age of reason.
Liz Braswell
#36. Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.
Gavin John Adams
#37. A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.
Douglas Wilson
#38. In his study of eighteenth-century feelings, John Mullan argues that sentimental passion and sympathy offered 'a more inclusive vocabulary of social coherence' than politics could provide. This
Francis Wheen
#39. The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.
Mark Kurlansky
#40. My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.
David McCullough
#41. LORD BOLINGBROKE, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, said that "history is philosophy teaching by examples." Thucydides is reported to have said much the same thing two thousand years earlier. Jefferson
David McCullough
#42. You are going to be incredibly embarrassed when you survive this, and I come back to make you answer for all of that poetry," she said. "I swear, you eighteenth-century men are so dramatic.
Alexandra Bracken
#43. They just didn't make them like that anymore. Nowadays she was lucky to get some mild flirtation from some leather-faced NRA lobbyist. Forget about doggy-style on an eighteenth-century canopied bed by a certified KGB agent who said things like beg for it my little Yankee poodle.
Magnus Flyte
#45. Denmark first responded to the denunciatory cries of the eighteenth century against slavery and the slave-trade. In 1792, by royal order, this traffic was prohibited in the Danish possessions after 1802.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#46. The recurrence during the eighteenth century Enlightenment of the aspiration to be the 'Newton of the moral sciences' testifies to the prestige not just of celestial mechanics, but of the 'experimental method' more generally.
Stefan Collini
#47. Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.
Wallace Shawn
#48. If you had to work in the environment of Washington, D.C., as I do, and watch those men who are so imprisoned and so confined by their eighteenth-century thought patterns, you would know that if anybody is going to be liberated, it's men who must be liberated in this country.
Barbara Jordan
#49. It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.
Evelyn Waugh
#50. The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.
Antal Szerb
#51. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.
Sylvia Plath
#52. On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.
Richard Flanagan
#53. The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?
Michael Shermer
#54. Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps
located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
Eric Weiner
#55. The eighteenth Century thought itself to be the age of reason; the nineteenth century thought itself to be the age of common sense while the twentieth century can only think of itself as the age of uncommon nonsense.
G.K. Chesterton
#56. Eighteenth century American furniture and the design of the architects Greene and Greene are my special love.
Barbra Streisand
#57. Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.
Edmund Husserl
#58. The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums.
Fernand Leger
#59. In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics - both touted and tolerated.
David Grubbs
#60. I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.
Florence King
#61. I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.
Naomie Harris
#62. I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
Orson Welles
#63. By the eighteenth century many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by events: dogged devotion to old techniques, suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia.
Timothy C.W. Blanning
#64. The zealous display the strength of their belief, while the judicious show the grounds of it. - WILLIAM SHENSTONE, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POET AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER
Josh Kaufman
#65. According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#66. Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.
Frances E. Willard
#67. This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something.
Tom Reiss
#68. [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.
John Desmond Bernal
#69. In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just by the earthquake, but also by the tsunami that followed, and then by fires that raged for days.
Nigel Warburton
#70. Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#71. You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.
George Lakoff
#72. if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is. Good
Ian Stewart
#73. It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
John Keats
#74. The word personality didn't exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of "having a good personality" was not widespread until the twentieth.
Susan Cain
#75. Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.
J. Christopher Herold
#76. To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.
Brigid Brophy
#77. Those who have not lived in the eighteenth century, in the years before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living and cannot imagine what it was like to have happiness in life.
Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
#78. The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.
Felix Klein
#79. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.
C.L.R. James
#80. Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.
Aldous Huxley
#81. Somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.
C.V. Wedgwood
#82. Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion answered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was a real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why Darwin was so controversial.
Nell Irvin Painter
#83. So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.
Mark Forsyth
#84. (optimisme itself was a word that first entered the French language in the eighteenth century).
Kenan Malik
#85. Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.
Jill Lepore
#86. The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
#87. Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.
Lewis H. Lapham
#88. Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.
Erich Maria Remarque
#89. Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
#90. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief,
Adam Nicolson
#91. This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest ... In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.
Christopher Hitchens
#92. I understand Jacqueline Kennedy has redone the White House in eighteenth-century style. Why, then, I'd fit in perfectly.
Barry Goldwater
#93. 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
#94. In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
Lytton Strachey
#95. I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
W.B.Yeats
#96. The customs are as formalised as an eighteenth-century minuet, and a child at the race's knee learns the moves and twirls by osmosis and observation.
Maya Angelou
#97. In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
Carl Sagan
#98. The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.
Isaiah Berlin
#99. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist
Fernand Leger
#100. discursive regimes of the late eighteenth century drew the figure of man into the sand, and even if he manages to survive the etching, typing, and storing of the late nineteenth-century analog media, he is certain to disappear with the compression of that sand into silicon.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
