19th Century Quotes - Page 4

• In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.

  Robert Hass

  Country, Teaching, Men

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

  Robert Hass

  Reading, Mean, Writing

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

  Robert Hass

  Book, People, Fifty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I believe sans serif typefaces - today upheld as models of neutrality and legibility - were called "Grotesques" in the 19th century because people thought they were hideous. But now we're used to them.

  Michael Bierut

  Believe, People, Neutrality

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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• We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life; but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.

  Erich Fromm

  Crazy, Mean, Men

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.

  Erich Fromm

  Mean, Men, Century

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Fall, Rome, Historical

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In the 19th century it was basically nationality and people trying to define their nationalism and create states which would reflect their nationalism. In the 20th century, ideology came to the fore, largely, but not exclusively, as a result of the Russian Revolution and we have fascism, communism and liberal democracy competing with each other. Well that's pretty much over.

  Samuel P. Huntington

  People, Democracy, Trying

  Interview With Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. June 17, 2012.

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• One of the reasons [William] Shakespeare is so endlessly fascinating is that you can look at that figure from about 10 different angles: Caliban in Shakespeare's day was probably viewed as a sort of comic, barbarian type, but into the 19th century there were productions where Caliban was the hero. He's a potential rapist of a minor. Is that a good thing? No, it is not. On the other hand, Prospero's got him cooped up in a cave and tortures him if he doesn't do what Prospero wants. Is that a good thing? No. Shakespeare doesn't let you off easy.

  Margaret Atwood

  Hero, Hands, Looks

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• What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Perfection, Anxiety

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Garden, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

  Robert Hass

  School, Writing, Movement

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• In the 19th century, Berlin was called the German Chicago. Or Chicago was called the American Berlin because they were sort of new cities or new powerhouses.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Cities, Chicago, Berlin

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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

  John le Carre

  Literature, Century, Made

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• 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

  Growing Up, Father, Love You

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. March 10, 2010.

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• Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

  Robert Hass

  Latin, People, Greek

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

  Eileen Myles

  Writing, Epic, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Most of the well-known American feminists of the 19th century did not come out against the institution of marriage.

  Karen DeCrow

  Feminist, Well Known, Institutions

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• I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

  John Banville

  Hopeless, Century

  "John Banville: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

  Margaret Atwood

  Views, Scrooge, Cards

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• Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Ignorance, Two, Scripture

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• Let's be honest - Bill Murray was onto something when he laughed at Andie MacDowell's degree in 19th century French poetry in 'Groundhog Day'.

  Marco Rubio

  Groundhog Day, Degrees, Bills

  "Marco Rubio's 'American Dreams': 10 key quotes" by James Hohmann, www.politico.com. January 09, 2015.

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• Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.

  George Pattison

  Teacher, Real, Past

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

  Colin Meloy

  Book, School, Average

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• An ethic of maternalism was central to the utopianism of 19th century feminists. I don't think that today's women see motherhood as a source of personal power, let alone political power. I don't think that women now have that same sense that their lives as mothers gives them any special power or virtue. I think women see their lives as mothers as an adjunct to their working lives - a fulfilling and important adjunct, to be sure - but something they do in addition to working in the public realm, not because being a wife and mother gives them a distinct edge in improving the world as we know it.

  Clare Wright

  Mother, Women, Thinking

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