Gertrude Stein Quotes

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

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

Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.

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

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.

I am a person of the 18th century.

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

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

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Then when I reached college I realized that many people had thought about the problem during the 18th and 19th centuries and so I studied those methods.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.