Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux Quotes

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

There aren't any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there's not much that's missing.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

I mean, the Constitution of this country was written 200 years ago. The house I was living in in Madrid is 350 years old! America is still a project, and you guys are working on it and bringing new things to it every day. That is beautiful to watch.

Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Fashion is a reflection of the time.

Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.

It's not just modern-day society that is liberal.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

So much American science fiction is parochial - not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

Nothing's changed except the dates on the newspapers. I'm in my same skin thinking the same old thoughts. The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.

Marriage is going to disappear, should disappear. And now the point is coming in the history of humanity where it becomes possible that marriage can disappear. It is already an outmoded phenomenon, it has lived too long and it has created nothing but misery. Marriage should disappear and love should flower again. One should live with insecurity and freedom. That I call intelligence.

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique.