Quotes About Ages

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project.

If you need a baby that bad, go down to the pound and get one. Not even a baby - go get an old man. There's unwanted people of all ages, pre-made and waiting for you.

he technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the "physical book," a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

We are humans who see clearly the barbarity of all ages except our own.

Vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but a single witness to his claims.

For the Christ of whom I speak has been revealed in this, the Dispensation of the Fulness [sic] of Times. He, together with His Father, appeared to the boy Joseph Smith in the year 1820, and when Joseph left the grove that day, he knew more of the nature of God than all the learned ministers of the gospel of the ages.

The Muppets have such a great tradition of bringing together all of genres of actors and all ages of actors.

witch-hunting misogyny is fiercely recurrent in this nation, even if its forms vary with the ages.

But how can we know that dragons did not exist? We have never actually BEEN to the Dark Ages.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Every phenomenon, however trifling it be, has a cause, and a mind infinitely powerful, and infinitely well-informed concerning the laws of nature could have foreseen it from the beginning of the ages. If a being with such a mind existed, we could play no game of chance with him; we should always lose.

For many ages it has been allowed by sensible men, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu: That is, There is nothing in the understanding which was not first perceived by some of the senses. All the knowledge which we naturally have is originally derived from our senses. And therefore those who want any sense cannot have the least knowledge or idea of the objects of that sense; as they that never had sight have not the least knowledge or conception of light or colours.

Life songs of ages, throbbing in my blood, have danced the rhythm of the tide and flood.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

The reading of books, what is it but conversing with the wisest men of all ages and all countries.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

The 19th century was the age of Individualism the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

Steve Forman strafes the south Florida scene with Boca Knights, an outrageously funny mystery novel with a raft of offbeat characters and prose that moves trippingly off the pen. His main man, Eddie Perlmutter, ex-Boston cop attempting semi-retirement in Boca Raton like a fish trying to retire out of the water, is a character for the ages. Carl Hiaasen, watch your back.

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.

The great ages did not contain the best talent, they wasted less.

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the number of overweight adult Americans increased over 60 percent between 1991 and 2000. According to CDC data, the U.S. population of overweight children between ages two and five increased by almost 36 percent from 1989 to 1999.

In the fabulous ages of ancient times the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were given to the planets as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical era, it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method, and call on Juno, Pallas, Apollo, or Minerva for a name to out new heavenly body. . . . I cannot but wish to take this opportunity of expressing my sense of gratitude, by giving the name Georgium Sidus, to a star [Uranus], by which (with to respect to us) first began to shine under His auspicious reign.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

All down the ages we see how blood has stained the surface of the earth; but now a ray of greater light has come, man's intelligence is greater, spirituality is beginning to grow, and a time is surely coming when the religions of the world will be at peace. ...let us join together to hasten forward the Divine Cause of unity, until all humanity knows itself to be one family, joined together in love.

The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious beliefin lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

Great ages of art come only when a widespread creative impulse meets an equally widespread impulse of sympathy . . .

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.

At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.

The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.

One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.

From the stage I've seen people of all ages absolutely roaring at really good toilet humour.

I played ten injury-free years between the ages of 12 and 22. Then, suddenly, it seemed like I was allergic to the twentieth century.

You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.