I think the inhabitants of the past are fighting hard to keep the rents they acquired in the 20th century.
I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.
If miracles represent prophecy, we must have more prophets in twenty first century than the entire human history.
We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.
'Indian policy' has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.
Racism and religious bigotry are two essential pieces of baggage mankind carries as it moves from one century to the next.
Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitler's passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.
The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.
In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.
We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century,' and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.
Freedom was the desire of our people throughout centuries. Freedom enabled our people to be owners of their destiny.
My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
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.
Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.
The search for a Jewish national home came about due to centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms, expulsions, discrimination and hate. The Holocaust was simply the evil culmination of all that came before it.
