Late Nineteenth Century

Famous quotes containing the words nineteenth century, late, nineteenth and/or century:

    Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    Lizzie Borden took an axe
    And gave her mother forty whacks;
    When she saw what she had done,
    She gave her father forty-one.
    —Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.

    The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)