Top 1200 Nineteenth Century Quotes & Sayings

If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda.

I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.

Before the 20th century, the ulcer was not a respectable disease. Doctors would say, 'You're under a lot of stress.' Nineteenth-century Europe and America had all these crazy health spas and quack treatments.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.

Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion answered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was a real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why Darwin was so controversial.

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

Posterity--the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism--grows ever harder to conceive.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY WAS DUE PRIMARILY TO A NEW BURST OF RELIGIOUS LIFE EMANATING FROM THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE. . . . NEVER IN ANY CORRESPONDING LENGTH OF TIME HAD THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE GIVEN RISE TO SO MANY NEW MOVEMENTS. NEVER HAD IT HAD QUITE SO GREAT AN EFFECT UPON WESTERN EUROPEAN PEOPLES. IT WAS FROM THIS ABOUNDING VIGOR THAT THERE ISSUED THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE WHICH DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SO AUGMENTED THE NUMERICAL STRENGTH AND THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

In nineteenth-century Russia, sauerkraut was valued more than caviar.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

Perhaps the best testimony to the effectiveness of the reforms of 1852 is the fact, that men of a slightly later generation, familiar with the working of the courts half a century after, find it difficult to believe that such abuses as are plainly described by the legislation of that year, should really have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.

The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

To build a twenty-first-century economy, America must revive a nineteenth-century habit--investing in the common, national economic resources that enable every person and every firm to create wealth and value.

I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth.

The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.

All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.

Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.

These 21st-century 'teavangelicals,' who represent a considerable segment of the Republican party, are vastly different from their 19th-century forebears. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were concerned with societal ills such as temperance, slavery, the rise of industrialisation and suffrage.

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

Let's bring it up to date with some snappy nineteenth century dialogue.

Titles are too "thin" for the nineteenth century.

'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.