1790s Quotes & Sayings

at the height of the British slave trade, in the 1790s, one large slave vessel left England for Africa every other day. — Bernard Bailyn

The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs? — Guy Endore

This crisis didn't have to happen. America had a boom-and-bust cycle from the 1790s to the 1930s, with a financial panic every ten to fifteen years. But we figured out how to fix it. Coming out of the Great Depression, the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle. When this crisis is over, there will be a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the rules. What we set in place will determine whether our country continues down this path toward a boom-and-bust economy or whether we reestablish an economy with more stability that gives ordinary folks a chance at real prosperity. — Elizabeth Warren

Well does he sleep who knows not that his sleep has been broken. — Publilius Syrus

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need. — Tommy Lee

I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on. — Robin Jarvis

Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000. — Henry Hitchings

She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. — George Orwell

It draws you in. You twist your mind into new shapes. You start to understand Caverna . . . and you fall in love with her. Imagine the most beautiful woman in the world, but with tunnels as her long, tangled, snake-like hair. Her skin is dappled in trap-lantern gold and velvety black, like a tropical frog. Her eyes are cavern lagoons, bottomless and full of hunger. When she smiles, she has diamonds and sapphires for teeth, thousands of them, needle-thin."

"But that sounds like a monster!"

"She is. Caverna is terrifying. This is love, not liking. You fear her, but she is all you can think about. — Frances Hardinge

In those days [the 1790s],the students paid their professors directly for the lectures-typically about three guineas a class (a guinea was worth slightly more than a pound). — Joshua Kendall

I probably haven't even seen ten of the films I've done. I don't get a joy out of it, and I don't go to the movies. — Robert Sean Leonard

The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal. — Lewis H. Lapham

The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

The first military-trained gang member was Samuel Mason, leader of the Mason gang of river pirates operating along the Ohio River from the 1790s. — Carter F. Smith

There are ten times as many sex slaves transported around the globe today as agrarian slaves were transported in the 1790s. — Nicholas D. Kristof

Government can provide opportunity. But opportunity means nothing unless people are prepared to seize it. — Richard M. Nixon