I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
Think about technological float: it took centuries for the wheel to gain universal acceptance. Now any microchip device can be in use around the world in weeks.
Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
The American Republic was bound - is still bound - to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome.
People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
As a great man's influence never ends, so also there is not definite finality, no end, to a great survey; it runs along for centuries, ever responsive to the strain of the increasing needs of a growing population and an enlarging domain.
Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.
We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.
Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.
Adequate defense has been the catchword of every militarist for centuries.
For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
For many centuries, humans have speculated that there might be planetary systems around other stars and that there could be extraterrestrial life there and even intelligent being. However, those were simply speculations, and now we have evidence for the first part of these ideas.
We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
The great houses of Britain have, for centuries, been the guardians of much of our history, not just of the families who built and lived in them, but of the people who worked there, of the local area, of all of us.
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.
It has been popular to threaten 'small islands and low-lying coasts' with scenarios of disastrous future flooding. The Maldives has been the most utilised target. We have undertaken a careful analysis of actual sea level changes in the Maldives. No rise has been recorded either in the present or the past centuries.
One aspect of this is the way we have come during recent centuries to appreciate that the world and indeed the very universe in which we live have evolved over immense periods of time.
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.
The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.
The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.
For centuries, the world has heard the oppressed, the downtrodden and the vulnerable cry out for their freedoms, for their rights and for a chance to emerge from the shadows of the tyranny and bloodshed that they had lived with.
Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees.
For centuries, New York has served as the gateway for millions of people from all over the world in search of the American dream. It only makes sense that it would now serve as a gateway for the world's greatest athletes.
Women have been kicking ass for centuries.
Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot hasn't changed for centuries. I shouldn't need to know any more details, any more history, in order to decide if my food tastes good or not.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
For many centuries, suicides were treated like criminals by the society. That is part of the terrible legacy that has come down into society's method of handling suicide recovery. Now we have to fight off the demons that have been hanging around suicide for centuries.
For more than two centuries since winning our own freedom, we the people of the United States have repeatedly answered the call to lead the quest for freedom around the globe.
The 21st century will be quite unlike the preceding two centuries, in which power was located in Europe and the U.S., and the rest of the world consisted of mere supplicants and bit players.
Mercantilism was an insidious economic theory that held Europe in its thrall in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.