18th Century Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 18th Century Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
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
Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.— Jonathan Sacks
Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?— Seth Shostak
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
Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.— Barbara Ehrenreich
I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.— Neal Stephenson
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
I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.— Niall Ferguson
Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since— Lev Grossman
well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.
From Jane Collier's "An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting" -— Jane Collier
In short, keep up in your mind the true spirit of contradiction to everything that is proposed or done; and although, from want of power, you may not be able to exercise tyranny, yet, by the help of perpetual mutiny, you may heavily torment and vex all there that love you; and be as troublesome as an impertinent fly, to those who care not three farthings about you.
In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.— A. N. Wilson
By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to challenge tradition and authority. They had the highest wages and highest living standard, and probably the most engagement between the populace and the government of any country. Then the United States took those same qualities to the nth degree, and the British were suddenly appeared stodgy and tradition-bound.— Charles R. Morris
![18th Century Sayings By Charles R. Morris: By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/18th-century-sayings-by-charles-r-morris-1341038.jpg "18th Century Sayings By Charles R. Morris: By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to")
When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.— Terry Eagleton
My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.— Bill Bryson
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
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
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
Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world.— Steven Pinker
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
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
It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many "red state" voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works.— George Lakoff
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
When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed.— Walter Russell Mead
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
It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.— Matthew Tobin Anderson
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
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
The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.— William Manchester
![18th Century Sayings By William Manchester: The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/18th-century-sayings-by-william-manchester-68266.jpg "18th Century Sayings By William Manchester: The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the")
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
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.— Karen Abbott
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
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
I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.— Anna Freeman
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.— M.H. Abrams
On how to make boys like you:— John Green
the third way is to be come something called "hot"
Now Katie I would argue that there are at least two
distinct definitions
of hot. There is the like normal
human definition which is that individual seems
suitable for mating. And then theirs the weird culturally
constructed definition of hot which is that individual is
malnourished and has probably had plastic bags inserted
into her breasts. Now boys might find that hot now but I don't think there's anything inherently hot about it like if you went back to the 18th century and ask a fifteen year old boy would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts that fifteen year old boy would probably be like: "What's plastic?
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
Look at the 18th century. There was a lot more freedom going on.— Steve Coogan
The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They're categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be.— Jess Row
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
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
There is a striking feature of the twentieth century ... the musical creation of the 20th century is qualitatively different from the 18th century, in that it lacks that immediate access or short-term access that was true of the past ... I have no doubt that if we took two children of today two groups and taught one of them Mozart Haydn & Beethoven and the other Schoenberg and post Schoenbergian music, that there would be very substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend and deal with it, and that may reflect, and in fact if that's correct it would reflect, something about our innate musical capacities.— Noam Chomsky
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.— Seamus Heaney
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
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
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.— Anthony Kennedy
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
He's reading a book called Great Warlocks of the 18th Century, and to get this ball rolling before Dean Devlin shows up and rains on our private parade, I snort and ask, "Good book?"— Rusty Fischer
I forget I'm pretending to be sitting behind my two-thousand-ninety-eight-page Highlights of Modern Chemistry book, so he snorts back. "Better than yours.
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
Upstairs, it's 18th century England, where farming out the poor meant lumping the blind, crippled, insane, epileptic, deaf and dumb in almshouses with criminals because The History of the Poor Laws was designed to discourage mendacity, wherein anyone giving alms to beggars was put in jail . . ." In other words, little has changed - many still believed there's no distinction between tolerating the suffering of others and causing it.— Philip Schultz
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
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.— Noam Chomsky
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
In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.— Salman Rushdie
Senator Goldwater would have been a great success in the movies - working for 18th century Fox.— Hubert H. Humphrey
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
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
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
Riker tells Data to just get on with it already, so Data says Ferengi are like Yankee traders from 18th-century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 600-year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway, and say, Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope!— Wil Wheaton
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
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
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
The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.— Michael Tippett
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
The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns - these remarkable traits so characterized the British 18th century— Caroline Alexander
Housetops were covered with 'gazers'; all wharves that offered a view were jammed with people ... As British officers happily reminded one another, it was the largest fleet ever seen in American waters. In fact it was the largest expeditionary force of the 18th century, the largest, most powerful force ever sent forth by Britain or any other nation.— David McCullough
The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages.— Jacob Lund Fisker
The United States may have retained more of the intellectual imprint of the British 18th century than Britain itself.— William Rees-Mogg
Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.— P. J. O'Rourke
I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to answer the originalists. It's not that the original paradigm cases are irrelevant, but you have to focus on the values the framers were trying to protect, not on the means with which those values were invaded in the 18th century.— Jeffrey Rosen
![18th Century Sayings By Jeffrey Rosen: I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/18th-century-sayings-by-jeffrey-rosen-1066672.jpg "18th Century Sayings By Jeffrey Rosen: I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to")
Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It's all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another "ism" which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that's why international socialism failed! People wanted to be Germans or Russians or Italians and they wanted to be socialists. Even the Soviet Union embraced national-socialism (socialism in one country) because that 'workers of the world unite' crap wouldn't fly. After Stalin, no Communist or socialist regime failed to exploit nationalism to one extent or another.— Jonah Goldberg
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
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
He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.— Charles Maurice De Talleyrand-Perigord
Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn't change the old racial order. I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.— Benjamin Jealous
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
I would love to do a period piece - in the 18th or 17th century. To me, it would be such an incredible challenge because of the way people carried themselves. There are so many incredible stories within those centuries - just the language and the way they carried themselves and what they were going through.— Amy Smart
Spending time on 18th-century ships in Tahiti when I was 17 was quite unusual.— Dexter Fletcher
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
Combinatorial analysis, in the trivial sense of manipulating binomial and multinomial coefficients, and formally expanding powers of infinite series by applications ad libitum and ad nauseamque of the multinomial theorem, represented the best that academic mathematics could do in the Germany of the late 18th century.— Richard Askey
In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.— Vandana Shiva
I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age— Charles Bukowski
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
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
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
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.— Rebecca Solnit
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
We like democracy because why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it's worth it - and why electoral democracy hasn't self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?— Noah Feldman
At that level through out the 18th century, another vision of admirable behavior persisted. The mob did not want the smooth conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely maneuver his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very opposite, the clever thief. The man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society but by opposing them and cheating them; by attending to the well-being of his own heroic self.— Adam Nicolson
Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it ... that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.— Marina Warner
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
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.— Bill Bryson
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
Let's suppose that you want to say, "I am a jerk." IN the 18th century, you would have to go around person to person and utter the phrase individually to each one of them. However, here in the third millennium, with our advances in telephone communication, it is possible to say "I am a jerk" to a thousand people at a time by forgetting to turn off your cell phone and having it ring during a performance of Death of a Salesman.— Steve Martin
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
Compare the scale and magnifcence of Versailles with St James's - the brick-built hovel in which the 18th-century kings of England lived. What was then the most powerful monarchy in the world housed its sovereigns in a converted leper hospital, yet, at the same time, parliament provided the magnificent palaces of Chelsea and Greenwich as hospitals for retired soldiers and sailors.— David Starkey
In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.— Linda Colley
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
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
