Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, civil, war, gilded and/or age:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
““... War on the destiny of man!
Doom on the sun!”
Before death takes you, O take back this.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Let Sporus tremble—‘What? That thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk?
Satire or sense, alas, can Sporus feel,
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys:”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Only in America ... do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles—and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)