“The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.”

—  Ernest Hemingway

"The Age Demanded" in Der Querschnitt (February 1925); as quoted in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit tha…" by Ernest Hemingway?
Ernest Hemingway photo
Ernest Hemingway 501
American author and journalist 1899–1961

Related quotes

“Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya.”

Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) Indian writer

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Alan Charles Kors photo

“The bodies demand accounting, apology, and repentance. Without such things, the age of communism lives.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

James Howard Kunstler photo

“The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 2, p. 23.

Neal Stephenson photo

“Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

William James photo

“The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. … It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.

Isaac D'Israeli photo

“After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Source: The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1795–1822), Ch. III.

Anne Sexton photo

“Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"
Transformations (1971)

P.G. Wodehouse photo

“It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Source: Jeeves in the Morning

Thomas Carlyle photo

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Related topics