“It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes , book Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner (1859)
Context: You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes 135

Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

“Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act IV
Uncle Vanya (1897)

“The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchist Morality http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralitytc.html (1890)
Context: The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her.
She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.
But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.

“The positive energy theorem was for half a century or more an open challenge to relativists. Many attempts were made to prove flat spacetime was stable, but none completely succeeded completely until a majestic tour de force of geometric reasoning of Shoen and Yau. This was followed two years later by a proof of Witten, which was as elegant as it was short. It is this proof of Witten’s that we take as a template here for the quantum theory.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

“The point is, your request for a lawyer comes about two hundred years too late to be meaningful. The verbalisms lag behind the facts. Nevertheless, you shall have a lawyer—or a lollipop, whichever you prefer, after I am through questioning you. If I were you, I’d take the lollipop. More nourishing.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 3, “Hunted” (p. 38) - Secret Service officer to the main character during an interrogation.

“India is the Saudi Arabia of human resources for the 21st century. The power that we used to get from oil in 20th century, we will get it from people like you in 21st century.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

Rahul Gandhi: India is going to be 21st century Saudi Arabia, Rahul Gandhi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YOZOM0lROs

“Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.”

Justin Cronin (1962) American writer

The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)

“And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

“Every day you waste a chance, many chances in fact, of getting at your innermost consciousness by expressing yourself as you see yourself, and I say it is a pity because it makes you, year after year and day after day more like anybody else and more anonymous.”

Ernest Dimnet (1866–1954) French writer

Source: The Art of Thinking (1928), p. 250

“It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.”

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Oliver Wendell Holmes 135

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