18th Century Quotes

• 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

  Artist, Past, Garden

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.155, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Fun, Class, Maids

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• 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

  People, Democracy, Needs

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• 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

  Thank You, Son, Wife

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• 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

  Mean, Years, Democracy

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I am a person of the 18th century.

  Cecilia Bartoli

  Century, Persons

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• 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

  Book, Thinking, Guy

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• 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

  Thinking, Important, Vivaldi

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

  Benjamin Franklin

  Inspirational, Happiness, Peace

  Benjamin Franklin, William-Temple Franklin (1818). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of (the Same), Continued to the Time of His Death by William Temple Franklin. - London, H. Colburn 1818”, p.270

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

  M. H. Abrams

  Biblical, Enlightenment, Philosopher

  "Honored literary scholar M.H. Abrams continues his labors (of love)". Interview with Linda Grace-Kobas, news.cornell.edu. June 11, 1999.

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

  Ron Chernow

  Mind, Topics, Century

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• 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.

  Seth Lloyd

  Needs, Want, Information

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• 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.

  Ernst Mayr

  Nature, Science, Men

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• 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

  Class, People, Water

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• 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

  Men, Air, Voice

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.544, Wordsworth Editions

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• Baroque civilization believed in two truths, which for a post-18th-century mindset are exclusive truths - we have to eliminate one to believe the other. They believed in the rational exploration of the universe, and they also believed that there was a hidden spiritual truth. Baroque thinkers were able to live the two at the same time. In any case, for me, it's necessary to live that way also.

  Eugene Green

  Spiritual, Believe, Civilization

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state... 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

  Atrocities, Violence, Easy

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• 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

  Journey, Practice, Hiking

  Leslie Stephen (2012). “Studies of a Biographer”, p.265, Cambridge University Press

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• Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place, indeed.

  Bill Bryson

  Dark, Night, Light

  "At Bryson's House, 'Home' Is Where The History Is". Interview with Renee Montagne, www.npr.org. October 5, 2010.

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• 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

  Order, White, Chocolate

  Noam Chomsky's Talk at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002.

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• 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

  Country, Thinking, Political

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• Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Rome, Ruins, Detroit

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• 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

  Country, Practice, Ideas

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• I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

  Charles Bukowski

  Tired, Space, Age

  Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

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

  William Rees-Mogg

  History, Intellectual, United States

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