Gilded Age Quotes

We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest. ~ Annalee Newitz

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate. ~ Louis Auchincloss

The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect. ~ William J. Clinton

The Gilded Age was much like today; the rich went on a rampage, gutting, by fair means or foul, any institution or principle that protected ordinary people against organized greed. At the end of it, the majority of the American people insisted, against enormous opposition, that the government's powers, structure, and values be modernized to reflect the interests of ordinary people rather than solely those of the wealthy. ~ Garrett Epps

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age. ~ Jaron Lanier

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. ~ Sarah Vowell

And English society was was not exactly welcoming to these rich newcomers: Imagine Kim Kardashian marrying Prince Henry today and you get the general idea of the suspicion and disdain that the Americans encountered. ~ Daisy Goodwin

It was the age of confidence. Arrogance was epidemic. ~ David Laskin

Love was like a stock, Lizzie realized. You gambled on its paying off in the long run - but it could just as easily cost you everything. ~ Joanna Shupe

I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars. ~ Mark Twain

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda. ~ Ron Fournier

At least in the Gilded Age age they gilded shit. ~ Josh Bazell

She can go places we cannot, associate with people we cannot, understand things about society types and women that we never can. (Why Mr. Burke hires Violet Strange.) ~ Candida Martinelli

This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who. ~ Gary Krist

[Grover} Cleveland, this product of good conscience and self-help, with his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, was a taxpayer's dream, the ideal bourgeois statesmen for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price. He was the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age. ~ Richard Hofstadter

A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy. ~ Erik Larson

I've always felt comfortable amongst the horrors. I married your uncle Gerard, after all. ~ Melika Dannese Lux

Reagan 's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else. ~ Bill Moyers

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens. ~ Charles Derber

Setting that little girl loose in her society would be like putting a fox in with the chickens. (Violet Strange's detective boss.) ~ Candida Martinelli

The free man cannot be long an ignorant man. ~ William McKinley

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life
a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it
filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction ... ~ Louis Auchincloss

An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. ~ John Galsworthy

Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13. ~ Larry Elder

When old customs get too stubborn, they don't let the new generation spread it's ideas. So they need to be broken. ~ Shiv Sangal

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. ~ Margaret Atwood

The irony of the information age is that it lends credibility to uninformed opinion. ~ Stephen Coonts

True love is so much more than sexual chemistry or attraction. True love is finding a mate who is as devoted to you as you are to them. Who will hold your hand through the good and the bad. Who will love you even though you've begun to age, started to wrinkle, when your looks are no longer what they once were. ~ Brenna Aubrey

The energy of our thoughts, words, actions, and emotions collectively create the frequency of our vibrational aura. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise. ~ Simon LeVay

Maturity comes not with age but with the acceptance of responsibility. You are only young once but immaturity can last a lifetime! ~ Edwin Louis Cole

I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight. ~ James Thurber

You can calculate Zsa Zsa Gabor's age by the rings on her fingers. ~ Bob Hope

We all must educate children at the youngest ages that private parts are private, 'no' means no, and there is only one code of honor for everyone. ~ Christine Pelosi

Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother. ~ Charles Bronfman

Of course, I peed my pants, everyone my age pees their pants. It's the coolest ~ Adam Sandler

My deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as a character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand
the American Ambassador to France upon being asked to evacuate Paris by the State Department on the eve of Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940 ~ William C. Bullitt

That was it, people moved away, he moved away. Their life in Carricklea, which they had imbued with such drama and significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way. ~ Sally Rooney

What occurs as you age is an accumulation of information, data, knowledge, and what I'm going to call the matrix of the mind. There's just a rich, textured, field of information and impressions that have been all networked by the brain. ~ George Carlin

I've been on the planet for 40 years now, and I'm still none the wiser as to what it's all about really. I've never worried about life's big questions. People at my age sit about pondering about 'why are we here?' The only time I ever asked meself that is when Suzanne booked us a surprise holiday to Lanzarote. ~ Karl Pilkington

I'm going to cure RM." Marcus laughed. "I wondered when someone would finally get around to that. It's been on my to-do list for ages, but you know how things are: Life gets so busy, and saving the human race is such an inconvenience. ~ Dan Wells

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. ~ Alice Walker

To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. ~ Earl Warren

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

After a certain age you get the face you deserve. ~ Joan Collins

It seems that when you get to a certain age you almost give yourself permission to misbehave and say what you think. People allow it, with very old people. ~ Julie Walters

The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten years
ago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The golden
age of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archie
loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered,
nothing was lost. History was never revised or
reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and
as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock. ~ Zadie Smith

I work from fatigue to fatigue at my age there's only so much daylight left. ~ Norman Rockwell

One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent's job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work. ~ Urie Bronfenbrenner

My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of - - , was, I believe, one of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether 'twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life, - on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year, - as certain as ever the Sunday-night came, - to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands: - And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of, - he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.

It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, - but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head. ~ Laurence Sterne

I've had watermelon hair where I had pink with green tips. From the age of 13 to about 19 or 20, I never had my real hair color. ~ Natalia Tena

Smell the aroma of beautiful food, then
go to the latrine and sniff. "What happened to you?" Your dung will answer,
"My beauty was a lure, a trick to get inside you."
Every matter particle does the same
enchantment. Try to see the beginning and end at once. Would you willingly wear manacles
just because they're made of gold? Admire the genius of an artist, but also watch what
happens to him or her in old age, how the expert craftsman's craft diminishes. ~ Rumi

You asked, what do I fear? I fear a man who believes in good. For he can excuse any evil. ~ Pierce Brown

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset. ~ Douglas A. Blackmon