Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

At my age I'm exactly the kind of person who has lived through one of the most quickly changing periods known to history. Surely there could never be in seventy years so much change.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.

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.

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.

We know that inevitably the millennials will get old and tired again, and then there will be the bilennials or trilennials, or whatever the next generation is, and we're all going to end up on our lawn shaking our fists in a bathrobe yelling at the moon.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

Modernity is not about dress codes.

Jesus is the purest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the pure, who, with his pierced hand has raised empires from their foundations, turned the stream of history from its old channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages

The young all have the same dream: to save the world. Some quickly forget this dream, convinced that there are more important things to do, like having a family, earning money, traveling, and learning a foreign language. Others, though, decide that it really is possible to make a difference in society and to shape the world we will hand on to future generations.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

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

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

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

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.