Ralph Adams Cram Quotes

Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

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.

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

Belgium is modernizing itself and it gives me joy.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

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.

This is our history - from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges - our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation's infrastructure.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

When an 18th century constitution forms the charter of liberty of a 20th century government, must its general provisions be construed and interpreted by an eighteenth century mind in the light of eighteenth century conditions and ideals? Clearly not. This were to command the race to halt in its progress, to stretch the state upon a veritable bed of Procrustes.

Every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.

Modern Times. It’s a very good historical book about history.

Do you believe that life today is the same as it was 10 centuries ago? This tremendous change was produced by the West. Who else produced it?

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to (by both) the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

Government is on a collision course with the future

Change is the raw material of history.

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.