Famous quotes containing the words seventeenth century, late and/or seventeenth:
“The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the seventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne’s observation, “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.””
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)