Our ascendancy of the past two centuries – first Europe and then the U.S. – has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.
Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world’s adult population only within the past 75 years.
It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to ‘discover’ a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.
Age-old therapies that Indian households have followed for centuries, like drinking kasha’s, mixing turmeric with pepper and honey, planting tulsi for purification and the use of aromatherapy to boost immunity have now become new age therapies.
What role did the Internet play in the Egyptian Revolution? People will be arguing about the answer to that question for decades if not centuries.
I had never been much of a science-fiction or Buck Rogers fan. I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come.
I think massage is a very important part of life, which is present from centuries as an imminent part of India’s tradition.
Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.
For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.
Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.
I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.
It’s easy to forget that for centuries – for millennia – the ‘workforce’ was all of us.
India Conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.
The arguments over the limits that may be put on individuals suspected of sympathising with the enemy have occurred over the centuries. Habeas corpus was suspended during the Napoleonic wars, and Defence Regulation 18b was applied during the Second World War.
Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
If we may not remain silent about evil in the Church, then neither should we keep silent about the great shining path of goodness and purity which the Christian faith has traced out over the course of the centuries.
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s ‘Courant’, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.
Globalisation is not remotely new; it has been occurring, at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for centuries.
Sacred texts give no specific depiction of God, so for centuries, artists and filmmakers have had to choose their own visual depiction.
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless – until they aren’t.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like ‘knight.’
For centuries in this country, black people were seen as three-fifths of a person. So when you hear the national anthem or you see an American flag as an African American person who has experienced the effects of that dehumanizing existence, it’s not going to mean the same.
You would think that the weapons of a king and queen were perhaps their armies or centuries of tradition but what they have is the power of the media. The visual is almost more important than words because they don’t have that many opportunities to speak.
There are some centuries which – apart from everything else – in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.
Fracking opens up vast tracts of the U.S. to exploitation by gas drillers. There’s enough energy under our feet to last us for decades, maybe centuries.
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties – axioms – that led to others.
There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
For centuries, America has led the world on a long march toward freedom and democracy. Let’s reclaim our clean energy leadership and lead the world toward clean energy independence.
Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The great houses of Britain have, for centuries, been the guardians of much of our history, not just of the families who built and lived in them, but of the people who worked there, of the local area, of all of us.
The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.
At the time when this famous historical battle was fought in Kosovo, the people were looking at the stars, expecting aid from them. Now, six centuries later, they are looking at the stars again, waiting to conquer them.
We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together, and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns.
History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it’s been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.
Enormous slaughter may have been acceptable in previous centuries. It simply isn’t acceptable anymore.
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.
I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.
Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father’s flocks.
My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with – the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries – is lost, and is not mourned enough.
The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.
The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.
It has taken centuries to create the freest, fairest, most prosperous societies in the world, and there have been lots of studies about this.
Children are part of the natural pattern of life. For centuries people have been having children and going to work. You get on with it, that’s what life’s about.
I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything – I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it’s like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that’s what they were doing; it’s like a message from another culture.
Trans women, trans men, AFAB – which is assigned female at birth – and non-binary performers, but especially trans women of color, have been doing drag for literal centuries and deserve to be equally represented and celebrated alongside cis men.
