#history

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BC, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#evolution #human-history #science #age

He (the British soldier) is generally beloved by two sorts of Companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers of a Scarlet Coat. ↗

— Richard Holmes

#age

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? ↗

— Gao Xingjian

#authors #continued #could #enduring #great

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled. ↗

— Charles Mackay

#history-of-mankind #reflection #age

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. ↗

— Rose Macaulay

#past-and-present #ruins #the-past #age

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting? ↗

— H.G. Wells

#jousting #middle-ages #age

Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#history #society #technology #western #age

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#battles #hegel #history #life #reminiscence

By the age of twenty the distinctly Branwellian qualities would be developed from which he would never again shake himself free. ↗

— Winifred Gérin

#age

Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_. ↗

— Kage Baker

#history #religion #age