Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. Bertrand Russell
Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction! Ian Hacking
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the "political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the "hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth. Marshall McLuhan
The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. Marshall McLuhan
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry. David Hare (dramatist)
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century. Rick Moody