historical upheaval Quotes

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

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.

[Whole] generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.

The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion.

The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

A greater persecution shall befall the Christian Church than has ever been in Africa, and will last until the year 1792, when there will be a revision of centuries.

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.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history.

Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.

The 1950s felt so safe and smug, the '60s so raw and raucous, the revolutions stacked one on top of another, in race relations, gender roles, generational conflict, the clash of church and state - so many values and vanities tossed on the bonfire, and no one had a concordance to explain why it was all happening at once.

Nations are born out of travail and suffering