Centuries

Famous quotes containing the word centuries:

    How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.
    Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)

    ... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between our present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    Men decided a few centuries ago that any job they found repulsive was women’s work.
    Frances Gabe, U.S. scientist. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 15, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)