Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the... historical inheritance of the American Revolution was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, con...ceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Diamonds may have been a girl's best friend in an era when a woman's only hope of having a high family income was to marry a man w...ho was well-off, but today, marketable skills that will enable a woman to command a good income over her lifetime are a better investment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circum...stantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process... data (but only data--i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of ano...maly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex ...about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing the ...airy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Sout...herners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »