Top 100 Century Old Quotes
#1. Congratulations!
If I may be so bold
Only 40 years to go
Before you're a century old
Just saying
John Walter Bratton
#2. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#3. The Indians franchise is more than a century old. It's been called the Blues, the Bronchos, and the Naps. It's also been called a lot worse during hard times when the team wasn't winning.
Tucker Elliot
#4. I sometimes wonder whether century-old ruins look so beautiful to us beacause they were *meant* to ruin in a beautiful way. There was a Romantic facination with structural decay; wealthy gentry had custom-built ruins erected on their estates, their own little Country Churchyards to elegize in
Paul Collins
#5. The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not.
L. Todd Rose
#6. There is a century-old saying, The dollar votes more times than the man.
Michael Parenti
#7. It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.
Daniel Pipes
#8. Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.
Kenzaburo Oe
#9. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
Terry Teachout
#10. Did you tell anyone?"
"No. Neither did I tell anyone about the time you broke into the chancellor's office and used a three-century-old marble bust to open the door."
"How did you know that?"
"I know now.
Jonathan Renshaw
#11. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible.
Albert Einstein
#12. It was a kind of sin, certainly, to forget - but it was not easy to remember, especially when names changed, languages changed. A century-old name held that century; when replaced, a hundred years were wiped out at one stroke. Amnesia set it; reality itself, being metamorphic, was affected.
Ninotchka Rosca
#13. I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.
Meg Rosoff
#14. In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.
Dan Simmons
#15. A friendship will be young after the lapse of half a century; a passion is old at the end of three months.
Sophie Swetchine
#16. If it were possible to go back in a time machine and change the stupid things some of us did in grammar school and junior high, Soups old buddy, that gadget would be booked up right into the twenty-third century.
Stephen King
#17. Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx-first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother.
Ronald Reagan
#18. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!
William Attwood
#19. I read an awful lot in college - a lot of Dickens, a lot of 19th century American stuff, a lot of old mysteries. Maybe it's helped me attain a certain fluidity with my style.
Josh Lieb
#20. She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.
Nella Larsen
#22. I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine.
David Mitchell
#23. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.
Clive Barker
#24. The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.
Jamie Lee Curtis
#25. A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#26. Computer hackers are the true journalists in the 21st Century. The old journalism is worse than dead. It is unreliable to the point that it is nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle in the pursuit of truth.
A.E. Samaan
#27. The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#28. was still afraid - not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself.
Jack Williamson
#29. Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well.
Madison Smartt Bell
#30. If you go to old houses on Long Island you will see painted Chinese wallpaper, which was big in the 18th century. Throughout history, notable, established families have always tried to link to the 18th century.
Catherine Martin
#31. I guess it's kind of the obvious thing for me to do 'cuz it's what I grew up listening to. The songs growing up and everything kind of seem like old music to them, but to me, it's just ... good music. And of course I did grow up in England in the 21st Century and that does come into it as well.
George Ezra
#32. While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.
Stephen Bayley
#33. Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.
Robert Wyatt
#34. I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
John Irving
#35. The sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality.
G.K. Chesterton
#36. People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.
Ray Kurzweil
#37. Thus, the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.
Vladimir Lenin
#38. A new generation forgets the specters that may have tormented the old ... And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same specter assailing the same man century after century.
Halldor Laxness
#39. I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age ... The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.
Hugo Black
#40. The high-strung Frieda made the mistake of telling Frau Fleschner that she had a toothache. She was taken to a dentist. He pulled ten of her teeth! After one day, they put her back in the fields, spitting blood. She was twenty-one years old.
Edith Hahn Beer
#41. I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
Deborah Harkness
#42. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.
Bram Stoker
#43. Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!
Charles De Gaulle
#44. The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls
Diana Vreeland
#45. The constant influx of new cultures, new ideas and new ways of looking at old problems is a big part of the reason why America has been the most dynamic economy in the world for well over a century.
Gary Locke
#46. For virtually all the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, it was not a crisis of the capitalist system, but imperialist war that pushed old orders into crisis...
S.A. Smith
#47. I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.
Penelope Lively
#48. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
Robert Hughes
#49. My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.
Lou Doillon
#50. How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
Richard Dawkins
#51. DeFrees, a dealer in nineteenth-century watercolors who for all her stiff clothes and strong perfumes was a hugger and a cuddler, with the old-ladyish habit of liking
Donna Tartt
#52. I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!
Natalie Merchant
#53. The old newspaper adage, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' is as true today as it was a century ago.
Peter Diamandis
#54. It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.
Dwight Yoakam
#55. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.
George Packer
#56. It's a hard spell and an old spell, and it works only if you understand the Great Vowel Shift of the Sixteenth Century - and if you're stupidly in love.
Rainbow Rowell
#57. In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.
Susan Griffin
#58. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.
David Liss
#59. I was practically born and raised at 20th Century Fox studio, started to work there selling papers when I was around seven years old, and every summer vacation from school I would work in a various department at the studio. So I was an old-timer when I was 15.
Richard D. Zanuck
#60. I think one of the great bits of The Muppet show is that it was set in a 19th century British theater and they live so nicely amongst that lovely old theater.
James Bobin
#61. Free soloing is almost as old as climbing itself, with roots in the 19th century. Climbers are continuing to push the boundaries. There are certainly better technical climbers than me. But if I have a particular gift, it's a mental one - the ability to keep it together where others might freak out.
Alex Honnold
#62. For me, it's always very beautiful that you can do something today in the 21st century which is not an imitation but which has a connection to art which is 4,000 years old.
Wolfgang Laib
#63. It's the twenty-first century. Arriving to find a bunch of old dudes in brown robes would be equally weird.
Kendare Blake
#64. There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.
Donald E. Westlake
#65. Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales
if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.
Barbara Kingsolver
#66. By the eighteenth century many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by events: dogged devotion to old techniques, suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia.
Timothy C.W. Blanning
#67. THE old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh ... And the same thing is happening to my generation.
Dambudzo Marechera
#68. The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.
Alice Morse Earle
#69. Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, What do you suppose the old fox meant by that?
Ronald Reagan
#70. The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
Niklas Zennstrom
#71. It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#72. The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.
Frederick C. Beiser
#73. The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy "old families " show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group.
Thomas Sowell
#74. I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.
Pete Seeger
#75. The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
John Green
#76. What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.
Charles Frazier
#77. I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.
Elias Canetti
#78. Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
Robertson Davies
#79. In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.
John Lothrop Motley
#80. How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.
Bill Holm
#81. Old Filey lies around the Ravine, a glacial gash running down to Coble Landing. This is the fishing Filey of centuries past, with neat little terraced cottages and a cluster of attractive 18th century houses.
David Hewson
#82. Nietzche ... he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
George Bernard Shaw
#83. We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.
George W. Bush
#84. America is old tobacco: gold and green. It's lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.
Guillermo Del Toro
#85. The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.
P. J. O'Rourke
#86. More than half a century has passed, and yet each spring, when I wander into the primrose wood, I see the pale yellow blooms and smell their sweetest scent - for a moment I am seven years old again and wandering in that fragrant wood.
Gertrude Jekyll
#87. Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.
George Vecsey
#88. Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?
Erik Larson
#89. All of the diseases that modern medicine declares war on never seem to touch any of those ninety-year-old farmers who have lived on bacon and eggs and butter for almost a century. The media, following current low-fat medical wisdom, calls that a paradox. We don't.
T.S. Wiley
#90. How old are you?" Isa gasped. Okay, so she hadn't gotten around to asking some things.
"One hundred and forty-three," Chance supplied, giving her a quick kiss. "But don't worry, darling. I don't feel a day over the century mark.
Jeaniene Frost
#91. I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?
Madeleine L'Engle
#92. I understand the power of the Internet, but I can't say that I'm there. I'm old-fashioned and living in a different century. I don't know. I just don't really understand the craze of it.
Ksenia Solo
#93. Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century.
Steve Erickson
#94. However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#95. Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.
Terri Windling
#96. During the last century a seven-year-old boy, Harry Service, was lost from his family's home in Manitoba and lived for two weeks with a badger in its underground den. When he was found he said that the badger had brought him food several times ...
Sally Carrighar
#97. To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
James Buchan
#98. The necessity for rational critique was increasingly felt in the tenth century, when the idea of a double truth became widespread: one for internal use and the other to be upheld outside the group; the old critical method was no longer sufficient, because it was known that a witness could lie.
Abdallah Laroui
#99. When a bookmark tumbles out of an old book pristine and unwrinkled, it is like a gasp of breath from another century.
Don Borchert
#100. I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn't been changed since the 19th century.
Susanna Kearsley
