Thirteenth Century Quotes

As St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century said it best, "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. ~ Shawn Achor

Most of history is indisputably written by the winners, yet "winning" at Poitiers actually meant that the economic, scientific, and cultural levels that Europeans attained in the thirteenth century could almost certainly have been achieved more than three centuries earlier had they been included in the Muslim world empire. ~ David Levering Lewis

Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit. ~ John F. Kennedy

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas ~ H.L. Mencken

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

For despite what some people say, love is not a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away. In many ways the twenty-first century is not that different from the thirteenth century. Both will be recorded in history as times of unprecedented religious clashes, cultural misunderstandings, and a general sense of insecurity and fear of the Other. At times like these, the need for love is greater than ever. Because love is the very essence and purpose of life. As Rumi reminds us, it hits everybody, including those who shun love - even those who use the word "romantic" as a sign of disapproval. ~ Elif Shafak

Another of those fools," said Dr. Kemp. "Like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with the 'Visible Man a-coming, sir!' I can't imagine what possess people. One might think we were in the thirteenth century. ~ H.G.Wells

But "Inquisition" can also mean a new kind of legal process that, when the pope introduced it in the thirteenth century, was one of the greatest leaps forward in legal history. Among its innovations was the office of state prosecutor. Investigations were now initiated by this office, and not - as had previously been the case - purely on the grounds of an accusation. ~ Hubert Wolf

The sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing ... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas ... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon claimed that "nobody can obtain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years." Today, the entire body of mathematics known to Bacon is now acquired by your average high school junior. ~ Joshua Foer

Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless. ~ Dustin Hoffman

Two great
contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism,
Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯
(d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin
and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers
for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that the receiving cultures in
which they worked had not developed the need for this enterprise. Philosophy
in Latin was to develop, even if on some of the foundations laid by Boethius,
much later,6 while in Syriac it reached its highest point with BarHebraeus in the thirteenth century only after it had developed in Arabic and was translated
from it. ~ Dimitri Gutas

All Cabinet Ministers and other senior ministers are still sworn in as Privy Counsellors for life. The oath (which dates back to the thirteenth-century and has been described as Britain's oldest secrecy provision) commits them to keep all advice to the monarch secret. ~ Clive Ponting

There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there.

The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women's lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year our, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For this relief--she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel--the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.

Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this. ~ Sarah Blake

Some bosses are so greedy (for themselves only) they forget underlings are not thirteenth-century peasants who can be satisfied with a glass of mead and three festivals a year. ~ Helen Gurley Brown

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people ... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution). ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man. ~ H.L. Mencken

A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me! ~ M.R. James

John Finnis observed that, since there is no doctrine of subjective rights in Aquinas and there is such a doctrine in Suarez, a "watershed" must be situated somewhere between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. But this view rests on the fallacy, widespread among modern jurists and philosophers who are not medieval specialists, that if an idea is not to be found in Aquinas it is not really a medieval idea at all. ~ Brian Tierney

Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails. ~ H.L. Mencken

In Old English, thou (thee, thine, etc.) was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you started to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French way of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French, which has tu and vous both possible for singulars; and that allowed a choice. The norm was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors - such as children to parents, or servants to masters, and thou would be used in return. But thou was also used to express special intimacy, such as when addressing God. It was also used when the lower classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even when they were closely related.
So, when someone changes from thou to you in a conversation, or the other way round, it conveys a different pragmatic force. It will express a change of attitude, or a new emotion or mood. ~ David Crystal

The Safavids were either of Kurdish or Turkish origin. In the late thirteenth century, a member of the Safavid family founded a Sunni Sufi religious brotherhood in Azerbaijan, the Turkish-speaking region of northwestern Iran. The brotherhood attracted an ardent following among the Turkish pastoral tribes of the area, and by the late fifteenth century its influence had expanded into Anatolia and Syria. The heads of the brotherhood led the tribes in a series of expeditions against the Christians of the Caucasus, thereby acquiring temporal power as well as enhancing their reputations as servants of Islam. Their Turkish followers were known as Qizilbash, the Redheaded Ones, after the red headgear they wore to identify themselves as supporters of the Safavid brotherhood. ~ William L. Cleveland

But when Polo travelled through the South Caucasus in the thirteenth century, he visited Silk Road territories long since vanished or metamorphosed, such as Lesser and Greater Hermenia, Turcomania, Georgiana, and Zorzania. 'Names are only the guests of reality,' the Chinese sage Hsu Yu noted in 2300 BCE, suggesting that borders are little more than collective myths--fictions that a certain number of people, for a certain period of time, believe are fact. ~ Kate Harris

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God. ~ Henry Adams

It is perhaps permissible here to draw attention to a distinction made by Martin Heidegger, who speaks of the duality of calculating and reflective thought. Both modes of thought are legitimate and necessary, but for this very reason neither can be absorbed in the other. There must therefore be both: calculating thought, which is concerned with "makability," and reflective thought, which is concerned with meaning. And one cannot deny that the Freiburg philosopher has a good deal of justification for expressing the fear that in an age in which calculating thought is celebrating the most amazing triumphs man is nevertheless threatened, perhaps more than ever before by thoughtlessness, by the flight from thought. By thinking only of the practicable, of what can be made, he is in danger of forgetting to reflect on himself and on the meaning of his existence. Of course, this temptation is present in every age. Thus in the thirteenth century the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure felt obliged to reproach his colleagues of the philosophical faculty at Paris with having learned how to measure the world but having forgotten how to measure themselves. ~ Benedict XVI

There's also way too much religion in the South to be consistent with good mental health.
Still, I love traveling down there, especially when I'm in the mood for a quick trip to the thirteenth century. I'm not someone who buys into all that 'New South' shit you hear; I judge a place by the number of lynchings they've had, overall. ~ George Carlin

In the thirteenth century, Bishop Henry of Liege had sixty-one children, fourteen of them within twenty-two months, setting perhaps a record of clerical philoprogenitiveness. ~ Morris Bishop

The chaos, the organized, instrumental fear and pestilence was everywhere, and still he was in love with his existence. In. Love. With the whole mad mess, the goldenness, the ripening young psyche of the world. ~ Laurie Perez

Why should we hate them? Because ours is the only true civilization! Even in science -- consider that we invented the sternpost rudder twelve hundred years before the Europeans did! Fore-and-aft sails in the third century! Treadmill paddle wheel for boats five hundred years later! Warships with rams and twenty paddle wheels by the twelfth century -- the British thought we had copied theirs, the fools! In the thirteenth century we had ships with fifty cabins for passengers, six-masts, double planking, water-tight compartments! Only in the last century did the barbarians even have transverse bulkheads! Five hundred years ago we already had ships four hundred and fifty feet long, and we grew fresh vegetables aboard in tubs! WE sailed the high seas to Sumatra and India, to Aden and Africa and even to Madagascar -- sixty years before the Portuguese bit a piece from the thigh of India! I curse Confucius and all those mad saints who persuaded us against war! Did you ever hear of Sun Wa, who lived three thousand years ago? No? Read the Art of War! 'If you are not in danger, do not fight,' he wrote. Now we are in danger! ~ Pearl S. Buck

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite. ~ Barbara Cassin

But now she wasn't sure if she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century. ~ Elif Shafak

Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance. ~ Hu Shih

The requirements of life still dictate that we spend our time in a way that is not that different from the African baboons. Give and take a few hours, most people sleep one-third of the day, and use the remainder to work, travel, and rest in more or less the same proportions as the baboons do. And as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth century French villages-which were among the most advanced in the world at the time-the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

As already noted, "Of eighty popes in a line from the thirteenth century on not one of them disapproved of the theology and apparatus of the Inquisition. On the contrary, one after another added his own cruel touches to the workings of this deadly machine. ~ Dave Hunt

Feathers, and a shield and a lance and a sword. His armor and his weapons were all, I am almost sure, of quite different periods. The shield was thirteenth century, while the sword was of the pattern used in the Peninsular War. The cuirass was of the time of Charles I., and the helmet dated from the Second Crusade. The arms on the shield were very grand - three red running lions on a blue ground. The tents were of the latest brand approved of by our modern War Office, and the whole appearance of camp, army, and leader might have been a shock to some. But Robert was dumb with admiration, and it all seemed to him perfectly correct, because he knew no more of heraldry or archaeology than the gifted artists who usually drew the pictures for the historical romances. The scene was indeed "exactly like a picture." He admired ~ E. Nesbit

An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine. ~ Chuck Klosterman

middle of the 12th century, Gratian composed a legal synthesis entitled Concordantia discordantium canonum [Concordance of Conflicting Canons]. It is better known as the Decretum. This work, considered as a corpus iuris canonici (a code containing the then-effective ecclesiastical laws), became a model for later jurists who added to it. ~ Stephen F. Brown

The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation - immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutional guarantees would be the practical basis for democracy. Subsequently, political institutions were shaped in such a way that they could facilitate the disposition of the public domain. But that expectation, as later generations ruefully observed, did not materialize. The combination of economics and government had instead produced a handful of owners and policy makers who were beyond the control of the ballot box. ~ Elmo Richardson

The tectonic, technology-driven shifts that characterize the Internet Century have rendered some of the commonly accepted strategic fundamentals we learned in school and on the job incorrect.56 ~ Eric Schmidt

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy. ~ Thomas Sowell

I survived
A dreadful accident
In the car crash of the century
My shattered hopes
Collapsed on cold cement
But in the back of the ambulance
I'd never felt so content. ~ Owl City

The English too, were turning their eyes to the South. In 1769, there was to be a transit of the planet Venus across the disc of the sun, a rare event which astronomers wanted to observe. The newly discovered island of Tahiti was judged the perfect site. The Royal Society in London asked the Royal Navy to organize the expedition. The Navy obliged. This was to have profound and unlooked-for consequences. It led to the virtual monopolization by naval officers of British Polar exploration until the first decade of this century. The voyage inspired by the transit of Venus was commanded by a man of quiet genius, James Cook, one of the greatest of discoverers. ~ Roland Huntford

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm. ~ Karlheinz Stockhausen

The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century. ~ Allyson Schwartz

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

So you can go to college on Pell Grants - maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it's turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century. ~ Denny Rehberg

As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. ~ Pankaj Mishra

A half century ago Herbert Wechsler could justify the legal right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the "universal judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims." That is not a universal judgment today. ~ Don Kates

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. ~ Joseph Brodsky

[W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.

...

We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself. ~ Jean Cocteau

I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward. ~ Christopher Bollen

I just predicted whose son will be taken in Storm of Century By Stephen King it was Ralph Emerick 'Ralphie' Anderson. Isn't it interesting that I gues who will be taken?? ~ Deyth Banger

Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery. ~ Emma Goldman

The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism. ~ Irving Kristol

Steak swallowers zonked on Television! ~ Allen Ginsberg

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means. ~ Terence McKenna

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever's view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: "One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities." Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the "power of facing unpleasant facts." True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we're lucky) to make the most of on this earth.

There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage. ~ Jeffrey Tayler

Water is the sleeping giant issue of the 21st century and we all need to wake up about it. ~ Robert Redford

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old. ~ Richard Dawkins

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind? ~ Emilie Autumn

this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses.20 ~ Jennifer Larson

Superman is going to live forever. They'll be reading Superman in the next century when you and I are gone. I felt, in that respect, I was doing the same thing. I wanted to be known. I wasn't going to sell a comic that was going to die quickly. ~ Jack Kirby

It should be pointed out, however, that throughout the debate emphasis was placed on raising money only for the proper expense of government.3 None of the advocates of income taxation spoke of expanding the functions of government, and while the opposition mentioned "socialism" it seems doubtful that they had any idea of a New Deal. The American mind of the nineteenth century was incapable of comprehending paternalism, regulation, and control; it was too strongly rooted in the past for that. Even those who advocated the tax method of undermining private property were not aware of what they were doing, and would probably have stopped in their tracks if they could have foreseen the consequences of their proposal. It was not any urgency for Big Government - which they could not even have understood - that prompted them to advocate income taxation. It was simply an urgency to "soak the rich" - the very common sin of envy. ~ Frank Chodorov

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God's Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody's refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert ~ Thomas McGuane

It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name - corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Henceforth the Cartesian surgical operation in which spirit and matter become totally separated dominated scientific and philosophic thought The domain of science was matter which was a pure "it" divorced completely from any ontological aspect other than pure quantity. Although there were protests here and there especially among English and German thinkers, this view became the very factor that determined the relationship between man and nature, scientifically and philosophically. Thus seventeenth-century rationalism is the unconscious background of all later scientific thought up to the present day. Whatever discoveries are made in the sciences and whatever changes are brought about in conceptions of time, space, matter and motion, the background of seventeenth-century rationalism remains. For this very reason, other interpretations of nature, especially the symbolic, have never been seriously considered and accepted. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Every science that has thriven has thriven upon its own symbols: logic, the only science which is admitted to have made no improvements in century after century, is the only one which has grown no symbols. ~ Augustus De Morgan

The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy. ~ Noam Chomsky

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially. ~ Bill McKibben

The true violin did not appear until about the year 1550. It did not reach its eminent position in the musical world until the late seventeenth century. ~ Bill Ballantine

Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they looked like this. But that's how we're going to remember them. Our alabaster past. When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect. ~ Julia David Levithan

If we invest in researching and developing energy technology, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions. ~ Bjorn Lomborg

Are human reactions what they've always been, or has a century or more of movies influenced our response to every stimulus ~ Dean Koontz

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy.
... and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.
The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them. ~ Isak Dinesen

I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there. ~ Ivan Illich

The world is filled with people and with beasts. Some are one, some the other. - Jarah-Och-Whum, ninth-century Imaryian bard ~ Herb J. Smith II

What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight? ~ Thomas Piketty

I hate fleeing as much as anyone," I said, "but Emma and I look like nineteenth-century axe murderers, and you're a dog who wears glasses. We're bound to be noticed. ~ Ransom Riggs

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. ~ George W. Bush