A Quote by Kate Williams
Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.
Related Quotes
I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
People have asked me about the 19th century and how I knew so much about it. And the fact is I really grew up in the 19th century, because North Carolina in the 1950s, the early years of my childhood, was exactly synchronous with North Carolina in the 1850s. And I used every scrap of knowledge that I had.
There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.
Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.
We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
Whatever the Victorians did right in England, we need to resuscitate over here. In the late 19th century, the entire English population were propagandised into buying into a certain code of morals. I would be happy if we could emulate that in some way in America.
The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.
If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.
Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.
The 19th century was the century of empires, the 20th was the century of nation states, and the 21st is the century of cities and mayors.
The department store was a product of the 19th century and became a very important institution as America went into the 20th century. It provided show places in developing towns like Terre Haute, Sacramento, and Dallas.
The American tradition of foreign policy exceptionalism, our grand strategy as a nation, reaches back much further. Really at the turn - the end of the 19th century, when we achieved power a generation after the Civil War, the outlines of an American vision came into focus, and what we - it was based on two things. One, our realization that our values and our interests were the same, and that our business interests would advance as our values advanced in the world.
In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.
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