Nineteenth Century Quotes - Page 3

• The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

  Germaine Greer

  Horse, Art, Men

  Germaine Greer (2001). “The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work”, p.105, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Running, Exhausted, Century

  John Maynard Keynes (1929). “The Economic Consequences of the Peace: The classic text on the Treaty of Versailles and post war Europe”, p.150, Harriman House Limited

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• Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.

  Clive Ponting

  House, Debate, Bans

  Clive Ponting (1990). “Secrecy in Britain”

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• Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Emotional

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Believe, Answers, Problem

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Writing, Fate, Destiny

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• The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Invention, Century, Method

  Science and the ModernWorld ch. 6 (1925)

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• The international institutions go around the world preaching liberalization, and the developing countries see that means open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren't going to open our markets to your commodities. In the nineteenth century, they used gunboats. Now they use economic weapons and arm-twisting.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Country, Mean, World

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY WAS DUE PRIMARILY TO A NEW BURST OF RELIGIOUS LIFE EMANATING FROM THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE. . . . NEVER IN ANY CORRESPONDING LENGTH OF TIME HAD THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE GIVEN RISE TO SO MANY NEW MOVEMENTS. NEVER HAD IT HAD QUITE SO GREAT AN EFFECT UPON WESTERN EUROPEAN PEOPLES. IT WAS FROM THIS ABOUNDING VIGOR THAT THERE ISSUED THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE WHICH DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SO AUGMENTED THE NUMERICAL STRENGTH AND THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

  Kenneth Scott Latourette

  Christian, Religious, Missionary

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• The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Revolutionary, Invention, Century

  George Bernard Shaw (1960). “Shaw, Plays by George Bernard”, Signet Classics

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• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Noble Man, Atrocities Committed

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• Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.

  Paul Tillich

  Art, Character, Literature

  Paul Tillich (1987). “On art and architecture”, Crossroad Publishing Company

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• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Running, Creativity, Daily Tasks

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• The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Philosophy, Men, Political

  Vladimir Il'ich Lenin (1975). “Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh”

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• Absolutely delightful, at first for its unspoiled picture of late-nineteenth-century Japan as seen through the eyes of three remarkable but very different Americans, [the missionary William Elliot Griffis [1843-1928], the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse [1838-1925], and the writer Lafcadio Hearn], and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perceptions of the country and the whole relationship between East and West--between the barbarian and the civilized. The book is a tour de force.

  Edwin O. Reischauer

  Country, Book, Eye

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• The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Eye, Thinking, Everyday

  "History as a System". Book by Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1962.

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• In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Writing, Eye, Order

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• American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.

  A. J. P. Taylor

  Country, African Tribes, Missionary

  "The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939". Book by A. J. P. Taylor, "The Great War: The Triumph of E. D. Morel", p. 157, 1957.

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• The great discovery of the nineteenth century, that we are of one blood with the lower animals, has created new ethical obligations which have not yet penetrated the public conscience. The clerical profession has been lamentably remiss in preaching this obvious duty.

  William Ralph Inge

  Animal, Discovery, Blood

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• When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

  Thomas Piketty

  Growth, Democracy, Society

  Thomas Piketty (2017). “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, p.1, Harvard University Press

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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• The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.

  Carl Ally

  Creativity, Bad Ass, Ideas

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• [Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Effort, Taste, Century

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• It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.

  Bruce McCall

  Dream, Golf, Self

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