Epoch Quotes - Page 5

• We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Men

  "A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin". Book edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, "Tomorrow" (1919), 1970.

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• My best wishes, in the joys, and festivities, and the solemn services of that day on which will be completed the fiftieth year from its birth, the independence of the United States. A remarkable epoch in the annals of the human race, destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be shaped by the human mind.

  John Adams

  Memorable, Race, Years

  "A Selection of Eulogies Pronounced in the Several States". Book by D.F. Robinson and Company, 1826.

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• Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, posses however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.

  Karl Marx

  Class, Two, Bourgeoisie

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Philip Gasper (2005). “The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document”, p.40, Haymarket Books

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• There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Religious, Sacrifice, Fate

  "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche, Chapter III, Aphorism 55, 1886.

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• What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Age, Prudes

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Marriage and Morals”, p.75, Routledge

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• There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery.

  Nelson Mandela

  Insecure, Democracy, Demand

  Nelson Mandela, United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (1982). “I have done my duty to my people and to South Africa: statement from the dock, 7 November 1962”

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• Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Believe, Our World, Order

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• When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth. We don't think about it, but it has a tremendous effect. But these are things you don't see right in front of your eyes. You need to think about them a little, to see what the consequences are. It's easy to put them aside, and the media don't talk about them.

  Noam Chomsky

  Eye, Thinking, Media

  Source: www.salon.com

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• Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

  Pierre Boulez

  Musician, Needs, Useless

  "Éventuellement... (Possibly...)". Essay by Pierre Boulez (1952) published in his book "Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship" (p. 133), 1991.

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• No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.

  Joseph Conrad

  Life, Dream, Essence

  Heart of Darkness ch. 1 (1902)

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• The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

  Max Weber

  Struggle, Moving, Fate

  Max Weber (2015). “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences”, p.84, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Perfection, Progress, Aviation

  Foreword to "The Gentle Tasady: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest" by John Nance, 1975.

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• The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.

  Carl Schmitt

  Organization, Political, World

  "Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty", by Carl Schmitt, translated by George Schwab, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

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• To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

  Distance, Moon, Rocks

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• Irrespective of todays judgment and the price we had to pay in this generation, we were able to close an epoch of divisions, different blocs and borders, opening the way for an era of globalization.

  Lech Walesa

  Division, Pay, Able

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• Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

  Diane Ackerman

  Mistake, Mean, Talent

  "The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us". Book by Diane Ackerman, September 14, 2015.

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• One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs.

  Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

  Art, Judging, Customs

  Letter to Sophie Brzeska-Savage Messiah By Harold Stanley (Jim) Ede, 1931.

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• Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

  George Orwell

  World, Slavery, May

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• Rivers and mountains are beautiful and made heroes bow and compete to catch the girl- lovely earth. Yet the emperors Shih Huang and Wu Ti were barely able to write. The first emperors of the Tang and Sung dynasties were crude. Genghis Khan, man of his epoch and favored by heaven, knew only how to hunt the great eagle. They are all gone. Only today are we men of feeling.

  Mao Zedong

  Beautiful, Girl, Hero

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• The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.

  Winston Churchill

  Ambition, Men, Play

  Winston Churchill, Robert Rhodes James (1980). “Churchill speaks: Winston S. Churchill in peace and war : collected speeches, 1897-1963”, Atheneum

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• For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

  Michio Kaku

  Beautiful, Science, Bystanders

  Michio Kaku (1999). “Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century”, p.5, Oxford Paperbacks

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• It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Profound, Causes

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Ignorance, Self, Essence

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2016). “Across the Plains”, p.179, BookRix

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• Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

  Don Cupitt

  Past, Reality, Years

  Don Cupitt (2010). “Theology's Strange Return”, p.69, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time.

  Richard Huelsenbeck

  Art, Hands, Body

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