Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, christianity, late, middle, ages, early and/or renaissance:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“With two thousand years of Christianity behind him ... a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.”
—Franklin Pierce Adams (1881–1960)
“Minerva House ... was “a finishing establishment for young ladies,” where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”
—Walter Pater 1839–1894, British writer, educator. originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine (Aug. 1878)
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)