Quotes About 19th Century

#1. I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

Julia Glass

#2. The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.

Wellington Webb

#3. The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

Jack Zipes

#4. As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

Noam Chomsky

#5. The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.

Thomas Piketty

#6. So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

Michael Beschloss

#7. France has lived a long time - eight or nine centuries - and yet art in France, too, was derivative up until the 19th Century.

Raoul Dufy

#8. In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

Kevin Haworth

#9. The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.

Mona Caird

#10. It's an irony that growing inequality could mean more money for philanthropy. In the U.S., quite a few of the ultra-rich have taken to heart the 19th century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie's comment that it's a disgrace to die wealthy.

Geoff Mulgan

#11. I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.

Larry Ellison

#12. You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue

Donika Kelly

#13. As boys going to sea immediately become nautical in speech, walk as if they already had their "sea legs" on, and shiver their timbers on all possible occasions, so I turned military at once, called my dinner my rations, saluted all new comers, and ordered a dress parade that very afternoon.

Louisa May Alcott

#14. My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

Marilynne Robinson

#15. The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.

Noam Chomsky

#16. In America, we have 19th century school conditions and a curriculum that prepares our kids for the 1990s.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

#17. One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.

Steven Johnson

#18. I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.

Claire Tomalin

#19. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Fanny Howe

#20. The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.

Thom Mayne

#21. When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I believed - completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause - that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor a Native American ballplayer named Louis Sockalexis, who played for Cleveland in the late 19th Century.

Joe Posnanski

#22. 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

#23. In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.

Elizabeth Peyton

#24. I read an awful lot in college - a lot of Dickens, a lot of 19th century American stuff, a lot of old mysteries. Maybe it's helped me attain a certain fluidity with my style.

Josh Lieb

#25. Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.

Colin G. Calloway

#26. Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

Candice Millard

#27. Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

Lillian Hellman

#28. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two.

Michael Dirda

#29. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

Robert Stone

#30. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#31. Our generation was born during the turmoil following the First World War. That war marked the dividing line - at least for the Western World - between the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.

Robert Kennedy

#32. 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

#33. Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

Elizabeth Blackburn

#34. U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.

Robert Breault

#35. Following its recognition as a state in 1832, Greece spent most of the remainder of the 19th century under the control of creditors. The pattern started with a default in 1832. In consequence, Greece's finances were put under French administration.

Steve Hanke

#36. We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century,' and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.

Nina Fedoroff

#37. Both sides of my family had come from Ireland in the 19th century for the same reason: There was nothing to eat over there. Since then, I've tried to make up for the potato famine by making the potato the only vegetable that passes these lips.

Art Donovan

#38. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#39. Our approach to medicine is very 19th-century. We are still in the dark ages. We really need to get to the molecular level so that we are no longer groping about in the dark.

Anne Wojcicki

#40. Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

C.P. Snow

#41. The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently.

Harold Holzer

#42. A lucky man, I've always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. Luck only happens once and it's always an accident when it does. (Dick Mannering
19th century New Zealand goldfields magnate)

Eleanor Catton

#43. I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.

Jaye Davidson

#44. More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

John Le Carre

#45. In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'

Margaret Thatcher

#46. Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.

Alan Cheuse

#47. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.

Ian McEwan

#48. We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#49. I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

Siri Hustvedt

#50. 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

#51. I'm homeless, in a funny way. My culture I think is completely rooted in German 19th century music I suppose.

Hans Zimmer

#52. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

Orhan Pamuk

#53. The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.

Evan Osnos

#54. [N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#55. The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.

Guy De Maupassant

#56. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#57. I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Lynn Abbey

#58. In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.

Seth Shostak

#59. Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

Emma Thompson

#60. 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

#61. Edward Curtis was a photographer in the late 19th century who tried to document the rapidly disappearing Native Americans. He assembled a canon of work which, today, is exemplary and invaluable.

Rhys Ifans

#62. There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.

Patti Smith

#63. Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.

Kate Williams

#64. The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

Edmund Phelps

#65. Typical horror movies of the 1930s were often given a period setting in what looked like a kind of stylized 19th century ... the sense of 'elsewhen', of distance, lent to many of these movies by their settings. They exist, as it were, in a 19th century of the mind.

Andrew Tudor

#66. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

Oscar Wilde

#67. There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I've often thought, 'Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape - absolutely beautiful.'

Margrethe II Of Denmark

#68. People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.

Ray Kurzweil

#69. Like the railroads that brought us together in the 19th century, these trails will bring us together in the 20th and 21st centuries. (at launch of the National Millennium Trails Program, 1999)

Hillary Clinton

#70. When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

Calvin Trillin

#71. Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Margaret Atwood

#72. The 19th-century Continental porcelain plaques that are worth the most money are the pretty ones.

Judith Miller

#73. Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

James Black

#74. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

#75. Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.

Terry Teachout

#76. My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

Wilbur Ross

#77. I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.

Jessica Dotta

#78. The Spanish Civil War, Britain was not involved in it. Going back a bit, there was the naval blockade to stop the slave trade in the 19th century; that was morally just. Shame they didn't bother to abolish slavery at the same time.

Jeremy Corbyn

#79. Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.

Walter Murch

#80. I had to restrain myself from buying a book on 19th-century fruit knives.

Susanna Clarke

#81. At the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in Austria, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Austria was much more pervasive than in Germany. And Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than Germans did, really.

Viggo Mortensen

#82. In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

Mark Billingham

#83. If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.

Tom Hodgkinson

#84. We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

Susan George

#85. In the same way that slavery was a moral challenge for the 19th century and totalitarianism was a challenge for the 20th century, the challenge that women and girls face around the world is the moral challenge of our time.

Sheryl WuDunn

#86. There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.

Twyla Tharp

#87. At the dawn of the 19th century, the country was awakening to its enormous scope and variety.

David Lavender

#88. The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied ... strength and beauty must go together.

Louisa May Alcott

#89. Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

Robert Dallek

#90. Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

Eva Zeisel

#91. This is not the 19th century, where actors are expected to play completely opposite roles. We're not typecast, but we're brought in because somebody thinks that it's a good fit, so you make it a better fit.

Kate Mulgrew

#92. TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

Joss Whedon

#93. From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali.

Steven Pinker

#94. I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.

Gary Shteyngart

#95. E. B. White had a romantic tenderness toward nature in a capital R, 19th-century way. He was knowledgeable, a part-time farmer, and a hardheaded realistic person.

Michael Sims

#96. Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.

Robyn Davidson

#97. His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

Garry Kasparov

#98. The fundamentalists are insistent that they know best. It's a dictatorial attitude towards personal morality, which is a modern creation that came about in the 19th century.

Steve Coogan

#99. I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

Ken Follett

#100. Before, when I was ordered to consider him intelligent, I kept on trying to and I considered myself stupid for not seeing how intelligent he was; but the moment I said, "he's stupid," but said it in a whisper, everything became quite clear.

Leo Tolstoy