Eighteenth Century Quotes

The most famous line in gastronomic history, 'Let them eat cake', turns out to have been an eighteenth-century cliche. According to Antonia Fraser, the French accused every foreign queen of saying it, beginning in 1670 with the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Theresa.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.

The Negroes who came to America directly from Africa in the eighteenth century were strikingly different from those whom generations of servitude later made comparatively docile. They were wild and turbulent in disposition and were likely at any moment to take revenge for the great wrong that had been inflicted upon them. The planters in the South knew this and lived in constant fear of uprisings. When the situation became too threatening, they placed prohibitive duties on importations [of Slaves], and they also sought to keep their slaves in subjection by barbarous and cruel modes of punishment, both crucifixion and burning being legalized in some early codes. On sea as well as on land Negroes frequently rose upon those who held them in bondage, and sometimes they actually won their freedom.

There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century.

The drama of the nation-state seeks to mold our personal face above all into conformity – one nation, under god. The only personal contribution that is really appreciated is what makes our nation-state, instead of the others, richer, more famous and above all more powerful….. Much of our historical face has been falsified. We are told we are one nation. But in fact no nationalism existed anywhere in the world in word or deed until the late eighteenth century. Except perhaps Iceland, no nation in the world is in fact but one nation. All are multicultural. The sacred face of the nation-state … keeps us all partial – meaning biased and incomplete – yet ready to die for it

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

The British arriving in South Africa at the close of the eighteenth century really came there to prevent the French from seizing the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch East India Company.

I'm a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

When an 18th century constitution forms the charter of liberty of a 20th century government, must its general provisions be construed and interpreted by an eighteenth century mind in the light of eighteenth century conditions and ideals? Clearly not. This were to command the race to halt in its progress, to stretch the state upon a veritable bed of Procrustes.

Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century.

The differences of opinion between the Catholic and Protestant Cantons [States] obliged Switzerland to remain aloof from European conflicts and, as a result, she remained in an untroubled state of peace throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was of great benefit to her economic development.

Irish Protestants as a whole liked self-government for Ireland when government was placed exclusively in Protestant hands, as was the case under the Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century. But the increasing pressure of the partially enfranchised Catholic majority frightened their leaders into accepting the Act of Union, and in the nineteenth century Irish Protestants learnt to accept the Union as the one possible guarantee against Catholic ascendancy in Ireland.