Historical Shift Quotes

For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

A totally new era in the history of mankind.

When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries - that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force - came to an abrupt end.

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.

Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.

I'm a history buff, and right now we're sitting on one of the most dramatic historical shifts that this planet has ever seen and we have a front row seat for it.

The '60s was the end of the America that the rest of the world liked.

I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.

Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.

Revolutions are not made, they come.

The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn't expect, something you haven't seen before, "Wow, elephants fly."

So we [Americans] have a history a taking care of each other. Now, for some strange reason starting sort of in the 20's with Woodrow Wilson, the government started getting involved in everything.

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

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

There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.

The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.

The greatest changes in history have come when people were able to shake off what others told them to do.