Quotes & Sayings About Epoch

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness. — James Madison

One epoch's "popular culture" is another's esoterica. — Alfred Appel Jr.

In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch — Bertrand Russell

Unconscious, perhaps, of the remote tendency of his own labours, he [Joseph Black] undermined that doctrine of material heat, which he seemed to support. For, by his advocacy of latent heat, he taught that its movements constantly battle, not only some of our senses, but all of them; and that, while our feelings make us believe that heat is lost, our intellect makes us believe that it is not lost. Here, we have apparent destructibility, and real indestructibility. To assert that a body received heat without its temperature rising, was to make the understanding correct the touch, and defy its dictates. It was a bold and beautiful paradox, which required courage as well as insight to broach, and the reception of which marks an epoch in the human mind, because it was an immense step towards idealizing matter into force. — Henry Thomas Buckle

Yesterday, there was a Tzar and there were slaves. Today, there is no Tzar, but the slaves are still here. Tomorrow there will be only Tzars. We walk forward in the name of the free man of tomorrow, the Tzar of tomorrow. We have gone through the epoch when the masses were oppressed. We are now going through the epoch when the individual is oppressed in the name of the masses. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

It just takes one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes — W.G. Sebald

Like every man who appears at an epoch which is historical and rendered famous by his works, Jesus Christ has a history, a history which the church and the world possess, and which, surrounded by countless memorials, has at least the same authenticity as any other history formed in the same countries, amidst the same peoples and in the same times. As, then, if I would study the lives of Brutus and Cassius, I should calmly open Plutarch, I open the Gospel to study Jesus Christ, and I do so with the same composure. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. — Le Corbusier

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature with such faultless accuracy. The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fibre and tendon and tissue of the human frame, represented in detail. It looked natural, because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way, unless his attention were occupied with some other matter. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it, now. I shall dream of it, sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs. — Mark Twain

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch. — Carl Linnaeus

There can be no doubt that the development of a practical method of water disinfection during the last two years marks an epoch in the art of water purification. — Charles-Edward A. Winslow

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Abruptly, she knew that after this night she was never going to be the same again. Nothing was ever going to be the same. Oh, yes, the man could define himself as the dawning of an epoch if he wanted to. There was, quite simply, before Adam and after Adam. — Karen Marie Moning

We should be most careful about retreating from the specific challenge of our age. We should be reluctant to turn our back upon the frontier of this epoch ... We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand slow march of our intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities. — James A. Michener

But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow that there is still always the danger of gynocide. — Helene Cixous

Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself. — Gianni Vattimo

Sunset is such a sad hour," she said, presently. "If I watch the end of a day - any day - I always feel it's the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything," he said. "That's why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there's no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don't you feel that? — Paul Bowles

On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society's greatest brutalities. — George Gilder

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into — Howard Zinn

Today's free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it. — Rebecca Traister

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream. — Catherine Millet

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress. — Juan Ramon Jimenez

Remember that you are at an exceptional hour in a unique epoch, that you have this great happiness, this invaluable privilege, of being present at the birth of a new world. — Sri Aurobindo

Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it. — Gunter Grass

We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things. — David Cronenberg

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities. — Michel Foucault

When we hold it (amber) in our hands, we hold also that furious epoch where rioted all monsters and poisons, where death fecundated and life destroyed, where superabundance demanded such existences, no souls, but fiercest animal fire - just for that I hate it! — Harriet Prescott Spofford

One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers... — Georges Bataille

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it? Yes in appearance, no in fact, for the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence, is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment. — Emil Cioran

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch. — Honore De Balzac

The first impression of the writings of Mr. J. J. Rousseau received by a knowledgeable reader, who is reading for something more than vanity or to kill time, is that he is encountering a lucidity of mind, a noble impulse of genius and a sensitive soul of such a high level that perhaps never an author of whatever epoch or of whatever people has been able to possess in combination.
The impression that immediately follows is bewilderment over the strange and contradictory opinions, which so oppose those which are in general circulation that one can easily come to the suspicion that the author, by virtue of his extraordinary talent, wishes to show off only the force of his bewitching wit and through the magic of rhetoric make himself something apart who through captivating novelties stands out among all rivals at wit. — Immanuel Kant

The obscurest epoch is today. — Robert Louis Stevenson

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine! — George Gamow

I am unable to rouse much interest in any highly civilized race, country or epoch, including this one. — Robert E. Howard

We live in a time of global transformation. The power on Earth no longer lies with the forces of imperialistic globalisation, but with those groups who are now connecting with the forces of transformation. It is not terror and violence, but trust and solidarity which will lead the new world. This is not just a wishful dream, but the objective reality of the coming epoch. — Dieter Duhm

Up to the 20th century, we can say that this whole period was an Earth epoch, 'Earth' meaning the riches of the earth, simple physical work. That is why there were wars, the movement of frontiers, war over riches. — Lech Walesa

There is a confusing dual structure in the relationship of the individual to history. Even the sensory certainties of suffering follow a predictable order of physical reactions, so that the undeniable reality of their dizziness, queasiness, or nausea can be regarded with equal plausibility as the hysterical symptoms of a transitional period - a hypochondria of the epoch and not of individual people. — Andreas Bernard

[A]ny musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch. — Pierre Boulez

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery. — Michio Kaku

On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times. — Gary Shteyngart

If we limit ourselves to painting as an example, both for brevity's sake and because in that field my ignorance is slightly less complete than it is in others, and if (wrongly, as I think) we agree to start an epoch with Giotto's Arena frescoes and then follow the line (nothing short of damnable though such "linear" arguments are) Giotto - Masaccio - Vinci - Michelangelo - Greco, no amount of emphasis on mystical ardors in the case of Greco can obliterate my point for anyone who has eyes that see. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking. — Gertrude Stein

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects. — Lion Feuchtwanger

We live in an epoch of denudation. — John Joly

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let's say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we'll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam. — J.G. Ballard

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch. — Alfred De Vigny

We are in the times of the beginning of a new epoch for Christianity. True apostolic Christianity is being restored to the earth. — Rick Joyner

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect. — James A. Haught

The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science. — Francis Galton

Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view. — Wassily Kandinsky

A great man may be the personification and type of the epoch for which God destines him, but he is never its creator. — Jean-Henri Merle D'Aubigne

Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch in time . . . Black holes may be entrances to Wonderlands. But are there Alices or white rabbits? — Carl Sagan

The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented. — Gertrude Stein

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers. — Kate Bernheimer

For not only is an odd man "not always" a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now - our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today. — Jean Nouvel

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. — Karl Marx

Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture. — Alexander Stoddart

To make an epoch in the world, two conditions are manifestly essential-a good head and a great inheritance. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Doubtless many can recall certain books which have greatly influenced their lives, and in my own case one stands out especially-a translation of Hofmeister's epoch-making treatise on the comparative morphology of plants. This book, studied while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, was undoubtedly the most important factor in determining the trend of my botanical investigation for many years. — Douglas Houghton Campbell

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch. — Marcel Duchamp

Because of poverty and ignorance, not everyman living on earth lives in the same epoch! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity. — Stephen Batchelor

For all of us Frenchmen, the guiding rule of our epoch is to be faithful to France. — Charles De Gaulle

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period. — George Washington

In living through this great epoch, it is difficult to reconcile oneself to the fact that one belongs to that mad, degenerate species that boasts of its free will. How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will. In such a place even I should be an ardent patriot! — Albert Einstein

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another. Talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic. — Grace Lee Boggs

Irrespective of todays judgment and the price we had to pay in this generation, we were able to close an epoch of divisions, different blocs and borders, opening the way for an era of globalization. — Lech Walesa

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. — Ted Sizer

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in. — Amin Maalouf

I. The Period It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, — Charles Dickens

Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.
Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production. — Karl Marx

We can no longer assume that our preaching takes place within a more or less 'Christian culture,' " Craig Loscalzo says. "The great narratives of Judeo-Christian belief, the pivotal stories of the Bible's characters, the epoch of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, either are not known or do not carry the meaning-making significance they did to previous generations. — Graham M. Johnston

Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: 'Cogito ergo sum'. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, 'Senito ergo sum'. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. — Brian W. Aldiss

Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch - that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Brothers and sisters no genuine change can ever take place in a generation or epoch without first slaying the dragon of religion. — Sunday Adelaja

All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs. — Karl Marx

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay. — Immanuel Kant

History is an amazing presence
it is the place where vanished time gathers. While we are in the flow of time, it is difficult to glean its significance, and it is only in looking back that we can recognize the hidden dimensions at work within a particular era or epoch. — John O'Donohue

When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. — Alfred North Whitehead

The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. — Carl Schmitt

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones. — Karl Marx

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired authorities, which was then beginning to absorb the energies of the Greek intellect, is the grandest movement in the profane annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy and far the better part of the political knowledge we possess. — Lord Acton

In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn. — Marcel Duchamp

I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict. — D.H. Lawrence

It was an epoch of her life, an hour never to be forgotten, this first coming into relation with a really noble library. — Charlotte M. Vaile

That is not my car!"
"Correction. You used to drive a falling apart Toyota. B.A."
Had his lips just brushed her hair? She shivered. And though she knew better than to ask, she did it anyway.
"Okay. You got me. What's B.A.?"
"Before. Adam. After Adam, you drive a BMW. I take care of what is mine. That Toyota wasn't safe."
Figured that arrogant beast would define himself as the dawning of an epoch.
"I'm not yours. It was too, and you can't just go around stealing."
"I didn't, and I filled out the paperwork myself. — Karen Marie Moning

What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind — C. Wright Mills

Was my sense of being in love not just the result of living in a particular cultural epoch? Was it not society, rather than any authentic urge, that was motivating me to pride myself on romantic love? In previous cultures and ages, would I not have been taught to ignore my feelings for Chloe in the way I was now taught to ignore (more or less) the impulse to wear stockings or to respond to insult with a challenge to a duel? "Some — Alain De Botton

It is indubitable that a 50-year-old mathematician knows the mathematics he learned at 20 or 30, but has only notions, often rather vague, of the mathematics of his epoch, i.e. the period of time when he is 50. — Jean Dieudonne

The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African "civilizations." Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European "civilizations." This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word "civilization" to describe Western Europe and North America. — Walter Rodney

In the present epoch of struggle between two worlds the two opposing and antagonistic trends penetrating the foundations of nearly all branches of biology are particularly sharply defined. — Trofim Lysenko

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom. — Booth Tarkington

It lets us hear the clanging air of history and slips the links of our own epoch onto that long concatenation. — Alena Graedon