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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“By the late '50s, something was happening in England, and it got to be quite exciting. The music world then started to explode with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was an incredible time with this mixture of independence in art, fashion, and the explosion of the pop sensibility. London was certainly at the center of it all for a few years. And as far as art is concerned, I think that sensibility of what was later called Pop art started in England even before America. And so I was lucky to be there.”

“By the late nineteenth century, as British cities teemed with new inhabitants, crime rates rose and more established residents came to be afflicted with a new, urban, and distinctly modern anxiety. For the middle and upper classes, it centered acutely on the protection of property, coalescing in particular around city dwellers who were not members of the bourgeoisie. These included the working class, the poor, new immigrants, and Jews, all of whom were viewed increasingly as agents of social contagion - a threat in urgent need of containment.”

“By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.”

“By the latter part of high school, by the middle of junior year in high school, Jay Rodriguez played me some Irakere records that that Paquito [D'Rivera] was on. And he also played me and our friend, Curtis Haywood, some Phil Woods records. And when I heard Phil, I just about lost my mind. I was playing the Charlie Parker Omnibook as part of my lessons. This was the '80s. There was no YouTube and all that. And we had three or four jazz records at that point.”

“By the laws of rectitude accused Persons, however atrocious their offences, are allowed to make their defence, and by a verdict of a Jury of their Peers, they are either convicted, or acquitted. I have some times thought that we Women are hardly dealt by since strictly speaking, we cannot legally be tried by our Peers, for men are not our Peers, and yet upon their breath our guilt or innocence depends— thus are our privileges in this, as in many other respects tyrannically abridged, and we are forced to yield to necessity.”

“By the light which the fire afforded, Waverley could discover that his attendants were not of the clan Ivor, for Fergus was particularly strict in requiring from his followers that they should wear the tartan striped in the mode peculiar to their race; a mark of distinction anciently general through the Highlands, and still maintained by those Chiefs who were proud of their lineage, or jealous of their separate and exclusive authority.”

“By the look in this one’s eye, ’twas a simple matter to place him there, among the terrible, ruthless sorts. But somehow, she couldn’t believe something so…beautiful could be so awful. And he was beautiful, to a hard line, masculine magnificence, all long, lean contours of hard heat and piercing eyes. A beast in his prime. Her dark-eyed proteus looked over his shoulder, scowling when he saw she had not ‘come,’ was not ‘over there.’ “Sit,” he growled. “And stay.” A fissure of anger opened up inside her. She narrowed her eyes and, very softly, barked.”

“By the mid-1980s, [Stephen Jay Gould] had emerged as a major public figure, using his background as a paleontologist to dive into controversies with radical stances on the ways new species emerge and how evolutionary change comes about. His [popular history of life] college class was composed of around six hundred students who, taking it as a distributional requirement, were unlikely to become science majors. This audience proved an ideal focal group for Gould to try out his new theories and presentations. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the fall he held forth, lecturing with dramatic flourish to undergraduates who either sat rapt in the front rows or sprawled sleeping in the rear ones.”

“By the mid-'80s, it was really apparent to me that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life.”

“By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.”

“By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.”