“In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton.”
Source: V. (1963), Chapter Ten, Part II
Context: In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.
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Thomas Pynchon 134
American novelist 1937Related quotes

“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) p. 143.
Misattributed
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 123

Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29th, 1925), The Impossible Mencken
1920s
Context: Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone-that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is, far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The man of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized- though I should not like to be put to giving names0 but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 237

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 166.

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 167
Context: The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion, and Turgot could not but take account of his influence. Yet no one could apparently be more unlike those who were especially named as the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. He remained reverential; he was never blasphemous, never blatant; he was careful to avoid giving needless pain or arousing fruitless discussion; and, while the tendency of his whole thinking was evidently removing him from the orthodoxy of the Church, his was a broader and deeper philosophy than that which was then dominant.

History Of The Freedom Movement In India Vol. 1 https://archive.org/stream/history1_201708/History+of+the+Freedom+Movement+in+India+Vol+1+-+RC+Majumdar_djvu.txt quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 310-311