Historical Transition Quotes

We are at that very point in time when a 400-year old age is rattling in its death bed and another is struggling to be born.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

We must accept that the phase of social development which began with the October Revolution has exhausted its driving force.

Main Street, U.S.A. is America at the turn of the century--the crossroads of an era. The gas lamps and the electric lamp--the horse-drawn car and auto car. Main Street is everyone's hometown- the heart line of America.

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas.

I'm really enamored with the idea of a reformed society, and I've always been fascinated with the Dark Ages as well as the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.

There's something frightening that comes with freedom. And there was something very frightening for a lot of slaves once they were free and were going through Reconstruction. It was like, what do you do now? There was nothing set up.

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return...