1878 Quotes & Sayings

(P)ersonality...is perhaps the very most important thing in the world. Yet we know only one or two things about it. We know that anybody's personality is made up of the sum total of all the actions and thoughts and desires of his life. And we know that though there aren't any words or any figures in any languages to set down that sum total accurately, still it is one of the first things that everybody knows about anybody else. And that really is all we know! — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Disraeli was now at the height of his fame and popularity. He still had his enemies ... But the people as a whole now admired and respected him deeply ... His unscrupulous past and cynical opportunism were being largely forgotten or forgiven. He was gradually becoming recognized not only as the prophet of a new Conservatism, at once compassionate at home and positive abroad, but as a great statesmen whom the Queen did well to honour. Power had brought responsibility. By 1878 the transformation in public attitudes towards Disraeli was complete. — Christopher Hibbert

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours [sic] when you cook — Salman Rushdie

Faced with an excess of beauty the mind can often only drink. — Jim Grimsley

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way. — Pierre Boulez

Even pigeons were once cherished in American cities, before all the handouts and garbage we've given them to eat allowed their numbers to explode. In 1878, the New York Times described pigeons as "honest birds" whose "right to feed in the street" was being challenged by sparrows. In — Jon Mooallem

[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]
Dear Boy,
Why don't you write to me? I don't know what has become of you.
As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.
However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come?
Yours
Oscar — Oscar Wilde

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. — Arthur Conan Doyle

When posing for a photograph, spinsters should avoid looking desperate or deprived. A serene smile will show that your circumstances are by choice and not for lack of beauty or character. -Miss Gertrude Hasslebrink, 1878 — Margaret Brownley

Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character's journey up the Congo River "was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world" - not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time.2 — Ibram X. Kendi

No one should be harassed or mistreated because of who they are, who they love, or what they believe. — Mike Pence

Failure in Afghanistan would have profound consequences for our national security. It would undermine the NATO alliance structure that has been the bedrock of Britain's defence for the last 60 years ... I will not allow this to happen on my watch. — Bob Ainsworth

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title. — John Muir

Love, love will tear us apart, again. — Ian Curtis

And if any work that I have done should have value beyond my own lifetime, I believe it will be the happy labors of the decade 1869-1878. — William Henry Jackson

The existence of poverty in the US should not be accepted as a necessary evil or insoluble problem, but should be considered a crisis requiring emergency measures. It is a matter of will and priorities, not a matter of resources. — Martin Luther King Jr.

As a people, we value family, education and success. Hunger is an enemy to all three. Scientific studies have demonstrated that even brief periods of hunger can permanently inhibit a child's mental, emotional and physical growth. Kids who are hungry do poorly in school and are unlikely to grow into productive adults. For families, experiencing hunger means living in a world of isolation and shame. Caring citizens must put an end to this disgrace. — Ted Danson

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed. — David Byrne

Story is morally neutral. It can express profound truth or propaganda. The two greatest political storytellers of the 20th Century were Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler. Because storytelling is a form of persuasive jujitsu, and because world is full of black belt storytellers, the corporate leader has to train both his offensive and defensive moves — Robert McKee

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. — Jane Goldman

What followed would inaugurate one of the most spatially astonishing crime sprees in U.S. history. Nineteenth-century New York City police chief George Washington Walling estimated that Leslie and his gang were behind an incredible 80 percent of all bank robberies in the United States at the time, until Leslie's betrayal in the spring of 1878. This would include the great Manhattan Savings Institution heist of October 1878, which netted nearly $3 million from one of the most impregnable buildings in North America. — Geoff Manaugh

Just like an animal, when you want to survive, you don't think anymore. — Bela Karolyi

My good friends," Chamberlain addressed the crowd, "this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor [Disraeli returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878]. I believe it is peace in our time." The next day, Hitler's army marched into the Sudetenland. — Robert L. Beir