Centuries Quotes

#1. Throughout the centuries, man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride; that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself; for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn?

Comte De Lautreamont

#2. The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given.

Barbara Quick

#3. The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries. Why should I let two thousand years of publicity go to waste?

Cecil B. DeMille

#4. History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

#5. We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#6. It is here, it exists - but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind - not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind - as one's only possession and key.

Ayn Rand

#7. At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#8. He belongs to that fraction of humanity which for centuries has made other fractions the objects of contempt and exploitation, then, when it saw the handwriting on the wall, set about to give them back their humanity.

Trinh T. Minh-ha

#9. For centuries there has been a long and honorable tradition of women who have resisted and protested against men and their power.

Dale Spender

#10. For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.

Eva Figes

#11. It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Matt Taibbi

#12. Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

John Green

#13. True science is at length disencumbered of the empirical determinations which had accumulated in the course of many centuries.

Franz Cumont

#14. How little we knew each other, though for centuries our homes had shared walls. How little we will learn, now that all we share is a border.

Amit Majmudar

#15. One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

Gail Godwin

#16. If there's anything I've learned in my three centuries, it's that I would rather feel pain, sorrow, and misery than go through life feeling nothing. I have learned to cherish my humanity with all it's beauty and bile.

Brittany Comeaux

#17. A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#18. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

Steven Pinker

#19. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

Gore Vidal

#20. As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.

Ralph Adams Cram

#21. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

Alan W. Watts

#22. HIV/AIDS is the greatest danger we have faced for many, many centuries. HIV/AIDS is worse than a war. It is like a world war. Millions of people are dying from it.

Nelson Mandela

#23. Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.

James Rollins

#24. Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer

J.R. Moehringer

#25. It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

Terry Pratchett

#26. I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.

David Hockney

#27. The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#28. Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

James Russell Lowell

#29. A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Leo Rosten

#30. 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

#31. He'd observed over the centuries that what made people old was when they could no longer keep up with change. It's the beginning of the end, though few recognize it as such at the time.

Alma Katsu

#32. Altogether one quarter of German territory was lost in 1945, territory which had for many centuries belonged to Germany.

Neil MacGregor

#33. History matters. It matters whether we tell the truth about what happened centuries ago, and it matters whether we tell the truth about more recent history. It matters because if we can't we will never be able to face the present, guaranteeing that our future will be doomed.

Robert Jensen

#34. White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries of condemnation of dancing on religious grounds.

Jamake Highwater

#35. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Erik Larson

#36. Why does mineral water that 'has trickled through mountains for centuries' have a 'use by' date?

Peter Kay

#37. France has lived a long time - eight or nine centuries - and yet art in France, too, was derivative up until the 19th Century.

Raoul Dufy

#38. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It

Mark Twain

#39. Every generation has found [the Bible's] message indispensable, and its influence on individuals and society over the centuries has been enormous.

Billy Graham

#40. It takes centuries for sense to become common

Anthony Steyning

#41. Music, arrow to pierce all barriers. Music, the great equalizer. Music, invader of centuries. Nectar of demons, whiskey flask of God.

Carolina De Robertis

#42. I would bend the knee before the poorest scavenger, the poorest untouchable in India for having participated in crushing him for centuries; I would even take the dust off his feet.

Mahatma Gandhi

#43. his voice was centuries old

Maggie Stiefvater

#44. Centuries of perfectly-pitched heartbreak resound through Les' microphone as Stella and I embrace in a slow dance.

Daven Anderson

#45. People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

Celia Green

#46. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.

Steven Weinberg

#47. What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Barack Obama

#48. However weary he might be of life after three centuries of it, he was more weary of witnessing death.

Nora Roberts

#49. For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas. Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.

William Jewett Tucker

#50. The beast exists because it is stronger than the thing that you call evolution. In it is some force of life, a demon, driving it through millions of centuries. It does not surrender so easily to weaklings like you and me.

Martin Berkeley

#51. For anarchy to succeed or simply to advance towards its success it must be conceived not only as a lighthouse which illuminates and attracts, but as something possible and attainable, not in centuries to come, but in a relatively short time and without relying on miracles ...

Errico Malatesta

#52. The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.

Elie Metchnikoff

#53. I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

Gregory Maguire

#54. What!' you say, 'will not all the sufferings of Israel through all these centuries suffice? Is there a yet future baptism of fire, through which they must pass?' Yes, this is clear.

Dalton Lifsey

#55. Green Inferno was the truth, everything can be saw, how we were in the privous centuries, how did we survive and many other interesting stuff.
So do you have the guts?

Deyth Banger

#56. The coal plants that will be built from 2005 to 2030 will release as much carbon dioxide as all of the coal burned since the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago.

Joseph J. Romm

#57. Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.

Mary Gaitskill

#58. A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

Anais Nin

#59. Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#60. The oil is a gift bestowed by God on the Arab nation, to use after centuries of poverty, backwardness and servitude - in raising its living standards, developing its economic, social and cultural conditions, and building up its own power to meet the challenges and conspiracies besetting it.

Saddam Hussein

#61. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.

Jo Walton

#62. I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.

Lech Walesa

#63. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

Roger Scruton

#64. But centuries of time have not made me insensitive

Christopher Pike

#65. As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

Neil MacGregor

#66. Life is not all sunshine, but yet I would willingly consent to live ten centuries out of pure curiosity!" That

Jules Verne

#67. Note to self: Don't get on Veritas's bad side. She holds a grudge for centuries.

Jeaniene Frost

#68. For centuries, musicians have sought to find me at the end of a needle or the bottom of a drink. It is an illusion. And it often ends badly. Take

Mitch Albom

#69. Regardless of the extraneous shit and the centuries I had to wait to get what was mine, destiny fuckin' loves me.

Kristen Ashley

#70. When two sides who consider each other enemies converge in armed struggle, for the moment they are no longer enemies. They are fellow human beings who face the same two choices that their ancestors did for centuries before them: to destroy each other or to prosper together.

Thomas Huynh

#71. Little did we guess that what has been called the century of the common man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries together in the history of the world.

Winston Churchill

#72. The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.

Reza Aslan

#73. The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

Jan Morris

#74. No golfer's journey is complete without a pilgrimage to St. Andrews, the mecca of the game. This is where it all began, back in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Alex Shoumatoff

#75. Although European thinkers see the Greeks as their intellectual forebears, the Greeks themselves looked toward the East for the sources of true wisdom-to Egypt, Persia, and, during the early centuries of the common era, India.

Gananath Obeyesekere

#76. I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.

Osip Mandelstam

#77. Just as Anne had hoped, this child would one day bring England to such glory and power that its name would echo down the centuries as one of the greatest monarchs who ever lived.

Tracy Borman

#78. Interesting. You Earth people glorify organized violence for 40 centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.

Leonard Nimoy

#79. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries; a principle, forever.

William George Jordan

#80. These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth.

Amish Tripathi

#81. After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#82. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

James Madison

#83. Everybody has done something about Marco Polo. It's the tiredest, most trite and worked-over subject in the world, and that was why it appealed to me, because I wanted to do something really new and different about something that had been worked over all these centuries, and I think I did.

Gary Jennings

#84. Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.

Peter Saul

#85. I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

Rosanne Cash

#86. For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#87. Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer. Then,

Douglas Adams

#88. You're seriously talking about a ghost. This building - or parts of it - has been here for two and a half centuries. It would strike me odder if there wasn't a ghost. Not everything, everyone, leaves.

Nora Roberts

#89. Snow-capped Snowdon has been an iconic Welsh image for centuries. It is shocking to think that in just 14 years, snow on this great mountain could become nothing but a permanent and distant memory.

Lembit Opik

#90. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

Carl Sagan

#91. In this manner, in early days, were formed those vast and prodigious layers of coal, which an ever - increasing consumption must utterly use up in about three centuries more, if people do not find some more economic light than gas, and some cheaper motive power than steam. All

Jules Verne

#92. The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else.

Abhijit Naskar

#93. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it.

P.D. James

#94. Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.

Noam Chomsky

#95. The hope and change the Democrats had in mind was nothing more than a retread of the failed and discredited socialist policies that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world. I fear America is teetering towards tyranny.

Jim DeMint

#96. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

Thomas Sowell

#97. If citizens followed their leaders' example throughout history, the human race would have died out centuries ago.

Heather Brewer

#98. It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature.

Frederick Rolfe

#99. In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

Beryl Markham

#100. There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

Alex Steffen