Top 100 Century's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.
Clive Barker
#7. 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
#8. I've studied the lives of the 20th century's great businessmen and concluded self-confidence was instrumental in all their success.
Alex Spanos
#9. That's one component: rather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.
Van Jones
#10. Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
Bill Bryson
#11. The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier.
Bruce Sterling
#12. Mars is the symbolic and totally stimulating next objective that could so dominate the next century's exploration efforts. From Mars, the resources of all the asteroids will become readily available.
Buzz Aldrin
#13. Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form.
Beeban Kidron
#14. I would far rather over-estimate the threat [imposed by the Patriot Act] and be proven wrong than to underestimate the threat and wake up one morning in a world where the 21st century's J Edgar Hoover has the power to blackmail anyone in America.
Tim Lee
#15. The century's most radical vice ... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.
Paul Johnson
#16. I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.
Charlotte Bronte
#17. I'll never buy a cell phone, I'd rather die than have a cell phones. Cell phones are the 21st century's ball and chain.
Rebecca McNutt
#18. I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.
Stephen King
#19. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.
Colin Ward
#20. Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.
Milan Kundera
#21. He seemed like someone who had woken up after a hundred years of sleep, shaking the dust of a century's dreams from his feet.
Cassandra Clare
#22. Sustaining growth is the century's big challenge.
Martin Wolf
#23. One of the century's most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
William Styron
#24. Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.
James Buchan
#25. India is going to be the 21st century's Saudi Arabia in terms of human resources
Rahul Gandhi
#26. I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.
Lewis Thomas
#27. Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language.
Jerome Kern
#28. The next century's task will be to rediscover its gods.
Andre Malraux
#29. I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
Paul Theroux
#30. It took the mind of Albert Einstein, the twentieth century's most brilliant and influential, to show that we can more accurately describe gravity's action-at-a-distance as a warp in the fabric of space-time, produced by any combination of matter and energy.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#31. In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century's wars combined.
John Shattuck
#32. I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.
Max F. Perutz
#33. I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
Sydney Pollack
#34. The great sin was adopting the 21st Century's Socialism, something that not even its founder, Ditrich knows exactly what it is, though he says it is under construction.
Rafael Correa
#35. We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind ... the underworld of the century's imaginings.
Brian Aldiss
#36. Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
George Will
#38. It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#39. The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
Chris Bohjalian
#40. The songs he chose reflected that same withdrawn, private man, but this man had the gift of expressing his inner soulscape through the medium of some of the 20th century's finest songwriters, from Rodgers and Hart to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Jimmy Webb, and as always, making those songs his own.
Neil Peart
#41. Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.
Yukio Mishima
#43. One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.
Ellis Peters
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.
Anna Freeman
#49. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
Michael Tippett
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.
David S. Rose
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. A century ago man's chief concern was his spiritual life; today his chief concern is with his physical and temporal affairs.
Billy Graham
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. How's your dance card look?" "Double-check your century Jules. No dance cards." Jules shrugged & gave me his most flirtatious smile.
Amy Plum
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#93. [The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism.
Sean Hannity
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Jonathan Sacks
#99. 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
#100. 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
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