18th Century Quotes

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

If the rise of European colonisation began in 18th century India, then the rallying cry of 'Jai Hind!' also signalled its end in 1947.

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.

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.

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".

I wanted to create a believable feeling for 18th Century reality in the Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. I didn't want this typical film feel of strange people in strange costumes, not really knowing what to do or how to move. If you put an 18th Century costume on Alan Rickman, it looks like he's been wearing it forever because he inhabits the stuff. He is a character that can really travel in time as an actor and transform into this 18th Century person with seemingly no effort.

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.

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

Bohemian Grove seems to be a kind of frat house affair. Bilderberg [philosophy] may be marginally more serious. The CFR is transparent. You can read their publications. In the 18th century it perhaps made some sense to conjure up the Illuminati and Masons. Not since.

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.

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.

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.

The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.

The Sufi saint Mazhar Jaan Jana of 18th century Delhi believed that the Quran condemns bowing before deities because in pre-Islamic idol worship stones were considered god. But Hindus pray to god through that idol, which is a reflection of god. In Vedas god is nirguna and nirankara, that is, he has no attributes and no shape, that is the real belief of Hindus. As Muslims visit graves, so Hindus worship idols.

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?

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.

The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.

The theory of social contracts extends as far back as Plato. 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.

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.

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.

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

What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

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.

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

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.

Fashion has been collected and exhibited for many years. People were picking up clothing of famous individuals, like Marie Antoinette's shoe or Napoleon's hat. That part of the resistance to having fashion in museums had to do with it being associated with femininity, and with the female body. Yet, as early as the 18th century, some people were recognizing that just as you collected art, you, might think about collecting fashion for museums, because it would provide insight into the way people thought about their lives and, and the way they envisioned themselves.

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.

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.

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

The vast majority of those of Scots lineage living in the Ulster counties in the 18th century had come across, or their people had come across, in the 1690s. And they were victims of famine. Over that decade, 30000-50000 people were fleeing from that disaster. In terms of per capita loss, it was of the same order of magnitude as the Irish famine (of the 19th century).

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

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.

One [paradox] is that pornography follows in that wake of women's liberation. The first instances of hard-core pornography were in late 18th-century in France, "the Golden Age of Women." The next wave in the 20th century comes from Sweden, one of the first countries where women voted. Then Germany, again, at the forefront of progress. Then America in the '80s, when women were closing the pay gap. And Japan, same thing.

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.

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.

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.

The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.

Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.

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

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

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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.

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.

I am a person of the 18th century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The word crap is actually another word that's very, very old. It was taken over from 17th century England by the pilgrim fathers and Americans were talking about things being crap in the 17th and 18th centuries. What Sir Thomas Crapper – complete coincidence – does is not invent the flushing toilet, as many, many people believe, but was a great promoter for it. He ran a business marketing other people's products and that's why his name was on them. When the American soldiers came over in the First World War, they all thought it was hilarious that it said 'crapper' on them.