Henry James Sr. Quotes on Time

Quotes

• “Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1 ed.). London: John Murray (1861). p. 170”

  The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract .

• “The early history of the property of married women ( c . 1873)”

  The family was based, not upon actual relationship, but upon power, and the husband acquired over his wife the same despotic power which the father had over his children.

• “The early history of the property of married women ( c. 1873)”

  We cannot give a reason, other than mere chance, why power over a wife should have retained the name of manus , why power over a child should have obtained another name, potestas , why power over slaves and inanimate property should in later times be called dominium . But, although the transformation of meanings be capricious, the process of specialisation is a permanent phenomenon, in the highest

• “Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilisation. The history of the two cannot be disentangled. Civilisation is nothing more than a name for the old order of the Aryan world, dissolved but perpetually re-constituting itself under a vast variety of solvent influences, of which infinitely the most powerful have been those which have, slowly, and in some parts of the world much less perfectly than others, substituted several property for collective ownership.”

  Village-Communities in the East and West (1876 ed.), p. 230