It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history.
Century
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.
I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.
As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.
Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
If I haven’t made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.