Defenders of the status quo will argue that this system has served us well over the centuries, that our parliamentary traditions have combined stability and flexibility and that we should not cast away in a minute what has taken generations to build.
Ferdinand Mount

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.
Pete Seeger

During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.
Lynn Abbey

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
Charles Baudelaire

For centuries many of the world's distinguished philosophers have assaulted Christianity as being irrational, superstitious and absurd.
Josh McDowell

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
Albert Camus

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
Annie Besant

For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.
Nursultan Nazarbayev

For centuries, New York has served as the gateway for millions of people from all over the world in search of the American dream. It only makes sense that it would now serve as a gateway for the world's greatest athletes.
Hillary Clinton

For centuries, the world has heard the oppressed, the downtrodden and the vulnerable cry out for their freedoms, for their rights and for a chance to emerge from the shadows of the tyranny and bloodshed that they had lived with.
Ginny B. Waite

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
H. L. Mencken

For many centuries, suicides were treated like criminals by the society. That is part of the terrible legacy that has come down into society's method of handling suicide recovery. Now we have to fight off the demons that have been hanging around suicide for centuries.
Judy Collins

For more than two centuries since winning our own freedom, we the people of the United States have repeatedly answered the call to lead the quest for freedom around the globe.
Mac Thornberry

For more than two centuries, the defenders of liberty have put their lives on the line, because they have known that we cannot take our freedoms for granted.
Virgil Goode

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
David Antin

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.
Patty Duke

Humor was not important only for me, humor was important for this nation for centuries, to survive, you know.
Milos Forman

I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference.
Ludwig Quidde

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.
Emile Zola