Quotes About 18th Century

#1. How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.

Susan George

#2. Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Randall Jarrell

#3. In the 18th century, if women wanted to travel and they dressed as a man, people would not look twice. Your clothes said everything. Also there were masters and servants swapping clothes. You could be anything, your clothes told everything!

Vivienne Westwood

#4. I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

Charles Bukowski

#5. Old Filey lies around the Ravine, a glacial gash running down to Coble Landing. This is the fishing Filey of centuries past, with neat little terraced cottages and a cluster of attractive 18th century houses.

David Hewson

#6. There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar ... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans.

Noam Chomsky

#7. Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study them.

Neil MacGregor

#8. 18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Bill Bryson

#9. Looking at paintings was a huge part of finding my way into the lush world of the 18th century.

Rebecca Miller

#10. I was doing a scene in a medical tent in 18th-century battle dress, pantaloons and a ripped shirt, and the guy from the crew kept asking me if I was OK, if I was too cold. I told him, 'Are you kidding? I'm from Wales!'

Owain Yeoman

#11. The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

Jonathan Coe

#12. Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet.

Henning Mankell

#13. It would be just as pointless to oppose the international use of English today as it would have been to oppose the worldwide use of French in the 18th century.

Maurice Allais

#14. I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

Natasha Trethewey

#15. Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.

Jay Parini

#16. The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.

William Manchester

#17. Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

P. J. O'Rourke

#18. At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether something of a mystery.

Linda Colley

#19. Rick Perry said America's revolutionary war was fought in the 16th century. When told it was actually the 18th century, Perry apologized and said, 'I never said I was a geology major.'

Conan O'Brien

#20. Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

Seamus Heaney

#21. I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

Niall Ferguson

#22. When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

Susanna Kearsley

#23. I'm very happy in my 18th century worker's cottage in Kent and playing my music for the dog-walkers paused outside.

Christian McKay

#24. There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

Deborah Harkness

#25. To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

James Buchan

#26. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Simon Mainwaring

#27. I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.

Cecilia Bartoli

#28. The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes - many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph - were punishable by death.

Susanne Alleyn

#29. Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

Rebecca Solnit

#30. It may be said of many palaeontologists, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper said recently of 18th century historians: "Their most serious error was to measure the past by the present".

D. V. Ager

#31. I'll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.

Barbra Streisand

#32. The question is not whether Tibet should be independent but the extent of the autonomy that it is allowed. Tibet has been firmly ensconced as part of the Chinese empire since the Qing dynasty's military intervention in Tibet in the early 18th century.

Martin Jacques

#33. 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

#34. Newt Gingrich wants to repeal child labor laws. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man that we need to lead us into the 18th century.

David Letterman

#35. Back in the mid-18th century, in 1745-1747, Ossetia was the first to become part of the Russian Empire. At that time, it was a united entity; North and South Ossetia were one state.

Vladimir Putin

#36. In the 18th Century William Blake saw Heaven in a grain of sand. Most people nowadays can't even see the writing on the wall.

Dean Cavanagh

#37. I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

Geraldine Brooks

#38. Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#39. Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space.

Alan Huffman

#40. The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

M.H. Abrams

#41. I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.

Margaret O'Brien

#42. Senator Goldwater would have been a great success in the movies - working for 18th century Fox.

Hubert H. Humphrey

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Look at the 18th century. There was a lot more freedom going on.

Steve Coogan

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Jonathan Sacks

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

Ernst W. Mayr

#62. 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

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

Michael Tippett

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

Cecilia Bartoli

#65. Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Simon Schama

#66. Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

Fiona Shaw

#67. You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."

Eric Weiner

#68. One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they've created these amazing churches.

Andre Leon Talley

#69. The United States may have retained more of the intellectual imprint of the British 18th century than Britain itself.

William Rees-Mogg

#70. Spending time on 18th-century ships in Tahiti when I was 17 was quite unusual.

Dexter Fletcher

#71. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.

David Liss

#72. In the 18th century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners independently.

Jardine Libaire

#73. People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously.

Moby

#74. We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

Erica Jong

#75. Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

Antonia Fraser

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. My collection of historical fashion consists of about 10,000 pieces - dresses and accessories, from 18th century to today. The main focus was initially Russian fashion, but now I have extended it to the whole European continent.

Alexander Vassiliev

#80. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the 18th century. The largest, most powerful force ever set forth from Britain or any nation.

David McCullough

#81. Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.

Paul Engle

#82. It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

#83. When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

Robert Smithson

#84. Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

Ron Chernow

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

Anna Freeman

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. I begin with writing the first
sentence - and trusting to Almighty
God for the second.

Laurence Sterne

#91. He found that after prolonged contact with Claire and her opinions, he had much less trust in physicians that heretofore - and he hadn't had much to begin with.

Diana Gabaldon