Epoch Quotes

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. (Thomas Mann)
The obscurest epoch is today. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
I am unable to rouse much interest in any highly civilized race, country or epoch, including this one. View quote
Robert E. Howard
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. View quote
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it. View quote
José Martí
My best wishes, in the joys, and festivities, and the solemn services of that day on which will be completed the fiftieth year from its birth, of the independence of the United States: a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race, destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be shaped by the human mind. View quote
John Adams
It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy. View quote
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
[A]ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch. (Pierre Boulez)
The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads. View quote
Giuseppe Mazzini
One of the fundamental preconditions of successful socialist construction is to ensure the people's readiness to defend themselves from the ravages of probable regional or global wars on the basis of the balance of forces generating from the basic contradictions of our epoch. View quote
Mengistu Haile Mariam
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie. View quote
Carl Sagan
By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. View quote
Carl Sagan
Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch. View quote
Joseph Goebbels
Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath. View quote
Pierre-Simon Laplace
The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. View quote
Carl Schmitt
The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair. (Winston Churchill)
b>England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain. View quote
Karl Marx
One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs. View quote
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
In living through this "great epoch," it is difficult to reconcile oneself to the fact that one belongs to that mad, degenerate species that boasts of its free will. How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will! In such a place even I should be an ardent patriot! View quote
Albert Einstein
With each technological ‘revolution', more energies began to be accessed, stored, and used than had been in the preceding epoch...On the whole, technological change is irreversible: whatever the nature of a technological revolution, it is always from the hoe to the plough, and not the other way around...Improvement generally means greater efficiency in the use of energy, materials, or information. It means greater speed, less investment of time and money, and operation on a larger scale. View quote
Ervin László