Famous quotes containing the words seventeenth century, late, seventeenth and/or century:
“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)
“How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it!”
—Hortense Odlum (1892?)
“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 Montaignes observation, I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“[Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weaponlaughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecutionthese can lift at a colossal humbugpush it a littleweaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)