Top 100 Century's Quotes
#1. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.
Dale Peck
#2. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.
Robert Pinsky
#3. Footnoting references, signalling quotations, and so on were no part of a 13th-century scholar's duty. He could recycle his own and his predecessor's work without a qualm. He knew nothing of copyright and plagiarism, which are 17th-century inventions.
Fergus Kerr
#4. I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.
Anna Freeman
#5. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
Michael Tippett
#6. Really? That would be a first. I'm the son of Hades, Jason. I might as well be covered in blood or sewage, the way people treat me. I don't belong anywhere. I'm not even from this century. But that's not enough to set me apart.
Rick Riordan
#7. The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.
Jack Zipes
#8. As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.
Noam Chomsky
#10. When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution.
T. S. Eliot
#11. We were sent to the Judengottesdienst, the children's service at the synagogue on Saturday afternoons. The maid was supposed to take us. But she was a Catholic, like most Austrians, and she feared the synagogue; and my mother - a working woman, dependent on her help - feared the maid.
Edith Hahn Beer
#12. It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#13. There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.
Paul Kantner
#14. It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.
Nic Fields
#15. Until the twentieth century, the T-shirt's role was strictly to form a barrier between a man's body and the more valuable clothing he actually wanted the world to see.
Tim Gunn
#16. Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.
David S. Rose
#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. Newton advanced, with one gigantic stride, from the regions of twilight into the noon day of science. A Boyle and a Hooke, who would otherwise have been deservedly the boast of their century, served but as obscure forerunners of Newton's glories.
Thomas Young
#19. So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.
Michael Beschloss
#20. It is U.S. workers who lose out when employers cannot get the high-tech graduates they need to compete with foreign companies in the 21st century economy.
Kit Bond
#21. It's embarrassing that we're in the 21st century and we don't even know what makes gravity work. I'm getting older and thinking maybe I should tackle more than the mundane. I may fail, but at least I will have tried.
Woody Norris
#22. A century ago man's chief concern was his spiritual life; today his chief concern is with his physical and temporal affairs.
Billy Graham
#23. There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.
Mark Twain
#24. So the story of Wild Fox Kang's attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot.
Jung Chang
#25. The 20th-century ulcer epidemic was a sign of good health in American people - good diet, strong acidity and healthy immune response actually make ulcers more likely. That's why businessmen eating giant T-bone steaks were prone to ulcers.
Barry Marshall
#26. I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#27. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.
Roger Scruton
#28. It's an irony that growing inequality could mean more money for philanthropy. In the U.S., quite a few of the ultra-rich have taken to heart the 19th century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie's comment that it's a disgrace to die wealthy.
Geoff Mulgan
#29. People need to heed the message of Chris Christie and get the job done. We don't want the last century, America's century, to be a historical accident.
Joseph M. Kyrillos
#30. 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
#31. I don't want to describe either Governor Mitt Romney or the Republicans as stupid, but I will say this - if you look at their platform, the 2012 platform, it looks like it's from another century and maybe even two. It looks like the platform of 1812.
Antonio Villaraigosa
#32. I noticed whenever you call information, 411, there's always a computer voice, and they go, 'What number would you like? City and state, please.' 'Yeah, I'd like the number of Macy's in Century City, California.' 'Did you say 'pretzel nuggets'?
Andy Kindler
#33. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#34. In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.
S. Jay Olshansky
#35. Oh my goodness, they are rocking so many variations of my high-top fade. I mean, Rihanna has taken it to a very angular 21st Century thing. Miss Fantasia has it in a very seductive, you know, up-flip, and it's just lovely, right? Oh, I think it's wonderful.
Anita Baker
#36. I've heard there are modern Scots clamoring for independence even in the twenty-first century. They even have their own parliament now - although to me that's kind of like Texas having its own president.
N. Gemini Sasson
#37. I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century.
Newt Gingrich
#38. For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.
Pankaj Mishra
#39. In the 21st century, I think it's fair to say, homosexuality is more accepted in Britain and it's wonderful that my generation has been able to grow up with that.
Dan Stevens
#40. This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place ... and the world waits while she powders her nose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#41. Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!' Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, 'Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite'.
C.S. Lewis
#42. How's your dance card look?" "Double-check your century Jules. No dance cards." Jules shrugged & gave me his most flirtatious smile.
Amy Plum
#43. In the seventeenth century the pound sterling was divided into twenty shillings (shortened to s.), and a shilling was divided into twelve pennies, or pence (shortened to d.). So an amount might be expressed as £2 10s 6d, or £2/10/6d.
Stephen Inwood
#44. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#45. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.
David Foster Wallace
#46. It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.
Annalee Newitz
#47. What I enjoy doing is challenging stereotypes of what people believe a Tory must be. You don't have to say every Tory is in it for themselves - it's pathetic caricaturing that has no place in the 21st century, and if we can challenge that stereotype, then great.
Louise Mensch
#48. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Henry Kissinger
#49. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
Antony Gormley
#50. Reading across disciplinary categories in this way provides one of the main organizing logics of this book because instinct's presence, absence, and characterization within different disciplines is in itself instructive about the changes to sexuality taking place around the turn of the century.
Kathleen Frederickson
#51. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#52. [The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism.
Sean Hannity
#53. NEVERLAND:The imaginary island home of Peter Pan and the lost boys. A place where you never grow up. Michael Jackson's former retreat. An accurate description of the 21st century.
Daniel Prokop
#54. In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.
Corita Kent
#55. 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
#56. One legislator accused me of having a 19th century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law abiding citizens should be one of government's primary concerns.
Jeffrey Gitomer
#57. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Jonathan Sacks
#58. I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.
Sylvester Stallone
#59. So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb. It's kind of silly if you think about it. I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools.
Andy Weir
#60. Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.
Thomas Szasz
#61. 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
#62. Girly' products can spur Japan's growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the 'manly' technologies.
Morinosuke Kawaguchi
#63. 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
#64. Don't live in the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your father's house ... Believe in seeds, earth, and the sea, but people above all. Love clouds, machines, and books, but people above all. Nazim Hikmet, 20th century Turkish poet
Nahid Rachlin
#65. So then do you think it's true that he killed someone? And what about the part where he wishes he could die?"
"If it IS true that he killed someone, that's bad."
In any case, "it seems like something is bothering Shuji" was now a contender for the Understatement of the Century.
Mizuki Nomura
#66. 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
#67. Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality ...
William Butler Yeats
#68. Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.
John James Cowperthwaite
#69. Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
Albert Schweitzer
#70. It's a sign of this film's greatness that the enormous sadness that accompanies the final leave-taking of the circus interior is a good deal more than the conclusion of an unpretentious evening's entertainments; it's a sublime and awesome coda to the career of one of this century's greatest artists.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
#71. Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.
Bernard Beckett
#72. Hey, Walks Like An Egyptian, how about for once you drop the formal stuff and talk like you live in the twenty-first century?" "The shit's gonna splatter, start buggin', yo," Mencheres responded instantly.
Jeaniene Frost
#73. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#74. Nearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.
Jerry Saltz
#75. Yet, Puerto Rico's economic convergence and political integration with the rest of the nation is in a state of arrest - even though the island has been within the national borders, political system and customs territory of the U.S. for a century.
Dick Thornburgh
#76. U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.
Robert Breault
#77. Following its recognition as a state in 1832, Greece spent most of the remainder of the 19th century under the control of creditors. The pattern started with a default in 1832. In consequence, Greece's finances were put under French administration.
Steve Hanke
#78. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone
#79. In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.
Anton Chekhov
#80. Mitt Romney has asked Todd Akin to step down. That's too bad. Todd Akin was the guy to lead the Republican Party into the 16th century.
David Letterman
#81. We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century,' and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.
Nina Fedoroff
#82. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.
Clive Barker
#83. The 21st century will be quite unlike the preceding two centuries, in which power was located in Europe and the U.S., and the rest of the world consisted of mere supplicants and bit players.
Martin Jacques
#84. Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#85. Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
Alan Dean Foster
#86. At the start of the twenty-first century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history's most massive stealth efforts in social profiling.
Joseph Turow
#87. Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
#88. As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
Pankaj Mishra
#89. The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.
Dan C. Quayle
#90. Peter Kropotkin ... was recognized by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds ... of the nineteenth century ... The lucidity and brilliance of his mind combined with his warm-heartednes s into the harmonious whole of a fascinating and gracious personality.
Emma Goldman
#91. Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.
Joan Miro
#92. it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.
David S. Rose
#93. It's important to move the theatre into the 21st Century.
David Soul
#94. Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.
Eric Ries
#95. I've studied the lives of the 20th century's great businessmen and concluded self-confidence was instrumental in all their success.
Alex Spanos
#96. Ah yes, you like to cook, don't you?
well, i used to. you need real dedication. fresh ingredients, a discerning palate, an eye for presentation. it's not a modern art. good cooking has hardly evolved since the nineteenth century.
Haruki Murakami
#97. It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.
Alexander McCall Smith
#98. If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.
Evelyn Waugh
#99. A lucky man, I've always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. Luck only happens once and it's always an accident when it does. (Dick Mannering
19th century New Zealand goldfields magnate)
Eleanor Catton
#100. I'm not sure what's more worrying. The list of demands or the fact he seems unaware the French stopped using francs in the last century and that Africa is a continent?" - Jerome
Jamie Scallion
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