Anachronism Quotes

“Wikipedia: Anachronism”

“Anachronism is still one of the most obvious faults when the unqualified (those expert in other disciplines, perhaps) attempt to do history.”

“His movements, his clothes, everything about him, seemed slightly out of place in this assembly. He spoiled the pattern; like Alvin, he was an anachronism.”

“Shakespeare’s historical ‘mistakes’ [Anachronism] like the notorious ‘sweaty night-caps’ and striking clock in Julius Ceasar, are a blemish in his plays”

“It is necessary, for exciting interest of any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners as well as the language of the age we live in."”

“Queen Elizabeth's Day
Anachronists! I rest on this,
Whoe’ver may count it schism;
Mere by-blows are the world and we,
And time within eternity
A sheer anachronism.”

“Then, suddenly, you're there, outside a dark-faced building, a brownstone anachronism that stares back dully with the defiant expression of the moronic and you have an impending sense of being challenged”

“I am not so serious
this passion is plagiarism
I might join your century
but only on a rare occasion
I was taken out before the labour pains set in
And now behold the world's worst accident I
am the girl anachronism!”

“A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against, the suggestions of romantic fiction there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice”

“All plays about the past must be to some extent anachronistic; all the more so one like Christopher Fry’s “The Lady is Not For Burning”, in which a partly pseudo-Elizabethan language is used for the expression of some distinctly modern thoughts.”

“Thanksgiving is not an anachronism whose time is past. It is much more than a holiday to celebrate a meal shared between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. It is a time to reflect and be thankful for what we have--not for what we cherish, desire or envy.”

“For anyone who grew up with Sunday school images of the Three Wise Men from the East arriving astride camels at the manger in Bethlehem, whatever uncertainties there may be of that story, at least one thing is clear: By then the camel in the service of human life was no longer an anachronism.”

“Anachronisms have their uses. A film can teach the audiences more about certain historical eras by deliberately getting a few selected details wildly, absurdly “wrong” than by getting them right. Call it the Big Anachronism: The detail that’s so over-the-top wrong that audiences start wondering why the filmmaker did it”

“And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literaiy life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton”

“At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether She be with or without .intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.”

“Anachronisms in movies get a bad rap from historians...That “thwack!” you hear in the theater whenever King Arthur (who lived in the 5th century, if we give him the benefit of the doubt on whole “really existing” thing) clanks onto the screen in full plate armor (invented in the 15th century) is some historian having a facepalm moment.”

“There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing more than a silly anachronism … There is no such thing as right, except when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment. Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it in one word, need. ~”

“Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.”

“Camels as a means of transportation abound in the Old Testament. When Abraham sends a servant to look for a bride for his son Isaac, that servant chooses Rebecca. And why? Because of her kindness in offering to water the camels. That's just one of dozens of camel cameos in the Bible, mostly in the book of Genesis, but scholars have long suspected that those camel caravans are a literary anachronism.”

“Examining deliberate anachronism, particularly in film adaptation, reveals that being faithful to the original can require removing it from its context. Through eradicating or neglecting historical background, anachronistic adaptation is able to free the themes from the text by demonstrating the universality that made the artwork so valuable in the first place; it is a necessary and paradoxical reversal.”