Half A Century Quotes

#1. Pius XII, more than half a century ago, said that the tragedy of our age was that it had lost its sense of sin, the awareness of sin. Today we add further to the tragedy by considering our illness, our sins, to be incurable, things that cannot be healed or forgiven. We

Pope Francis

#2. For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.

Ralph Nader

#3. A friendship will be young after the lapse of half a century; a passion is old at the end of three months.

Sophie Swetchine

#4. Back then, a half-a-century ago, the situation was totally different. Economically, we were practically on our knees, and politically, we were still excluded from the community of nations. Today, in this respect, we have a totally different and much more stable basis.

Franz Beckenbauer

#5. I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health. Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?

Charlotte Bronte

#6. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

Gustave Flaubert

#7. The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.

Isaac Deutscher

#8. 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

#9. Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers.

Carl Sagan

#10. Twenty-two years eight months and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha- Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis - the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.

Aldous Huxley

#11. If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.

Auberon Herbert

#12. During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#13. Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

Gore Vidal

#14. Half a century goes by in what seems like a year. Don't waste an hour in boredom, son, or wishing for tomorrow.

Dean Koontz

#15. Surprisingly now, over a half a century later, time symmetric approaches to electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology might be consonant with the kind of eschatology that a theist such as Pannenberg supports.

Robert John Russell

#16. When Warren Buffett talks about competing against only half of the population, I think about her and wonder how different her life might have been if she had been born half a century later.

Sheryl Sandberg

#17. She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#18. For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some it crept into his bones.

Max Gladstone

#19. For more than half a century they belonged to one another. She detested the same characteristics in him that last day as she had the first time she saw him under that tree, and still adored all the others.

Fredrik Backman

#20. When I submitted samples, I had only written stories to give myself something to draw. I was told, "The art is good, but not quite professional yet. But, I like the writing." I've been a writer for almost a half a century. It's very cool.

Len Wein

#21. For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

Gore Vidal

#22. We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man's view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed.

Stephen Hawking

#23. Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.

Charlie Crist

#24. Dimka wondered what it must be like, to love a woman for half a century and then lose her, suddenly, between one beat of the heart and the next.

Ken Follett

#25. Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook?

Daniel Suarez

#26. My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

Antonio Porchia

#27. The issue [Israeli-Palestinian conflict], already lasting more than half a century, has brought deep suffering to the Palestinian people and remains an important reason of extended turbulence in the Middle East region.

Xi Jinping

#28. Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#29. Whatever I did in 1960, half a century ago, I couldn't do that today and enter the field. The field has changed so much, you have to adapt to the times whatever you're doing. That's the reality of life: you have to be a different person today than you had to be then.

Douglas Kirkland

#30. 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

#31. It has been well over half a century and I'm glad to say we have taken the right path from authoritarianism to democracy and this is a road of no return.

Chen Shui-bian

#32. All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

Thomas Piketty

#33. To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven't lost any of my past, and I am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look to the future.

Madeleine L'Engle

#34. Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

David Cameron

#35. Born and raised in Paris, I am deeply attached to my city; we almost have half a century of love story together, where I have been truly completely faithful! The most beautiful city in the world is my city, yeepeeee!

Christian Louboutin

#36. Although the war in which you fought took place more than half-a-century ago, your courage, your sacrifice and your patriotism reaches through the decades and inspires us today.

Mike Ferguson

#37. After nearly half a century, it's easy to forget that the Hays Code was not some outside limitation imposed by the government. It was a content standard imposed by motion picture companies voluntarily.

Ben Shapiro

#38. The wisdom of our actions in the first three years of peace will determine the course of world history for half a century.

Henry A. Wallace

#39. Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

Richard Meier

#40. But the value of silver, though it sometimes varies greatly from century to century, seldom varies much from year to year, but frequently continues the same, or very nearly the same, for half a century or a century together.

Adam Smith

#41. Social Democracy preached against capitalism for half a century. After the November revolution the Reds had the opportunity to direct capitalism into the proper paths: but nothing happened!

Julius Streicher

#42. With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.

Michael Douglas

#43. Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in more than half a century since 1945 has been based on antipathy.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 11

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#44. The capitol city of Angkor Kol Ker, the heart of the Khmer empire, held architecture the likes of which Europe would not see for half a century.

Robert Doherty

#45. A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Alan Ryan

#46. With a modest amount of looks and talent and more than a modicum of serendipity, I've managed to stretch my 15 minutes of fame into more than half a century of good fortune.

Robert Vaughn

#47. As a historical legacy, the Kashmir conflict has been an outstanding issue for more than half a century.

Li Peng

#48. Rosa Parks' courage, determination, and tenacity continue to be an inspiration to all those committed to non-violent protest and change nearly half a century later.

Bob Filner

#49. In California, for so long now, our families have been struggling in this economic environment, and Dianne Feinstein, been in office nearly half a century, is out of touch of what women and families are going through in California.

Elizabeth Emken

#50. 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

#51. From now on, nothing is impossible for Israel, which is a normal country like any other. We won't wait another half a century to sit on the Security Council.

Dan Gillerman

#52. Over half a century on and they're still complaining about it. Compare it to the fact that Garden State didn't win an Oscar and they seem a little petty if you ask me. I guess that just goes to show what kind of people they really are.

Zach Braff

#53. In half a century of challenge and learning and trial-and-error, each of us had struggled from hard times to a present lovely beyond our dreams.

Richard Bach

#54. The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story.

Geza Vermes

#55. That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#56. For more than a half a century, we know that we prospered because of a bipartisan consensus on defense and foreign policy. We must do more than return to that sensible, cooperative approach.

Hillary Clinton

#57. The dance, like most dances after supper, was a merry one; some of the older folks joined in it, and the squire himself figured down several couple with a partner, with whom he affirmed he had danced at every Christmas for nearly half a century.

Washington Irving

#58. After over half a century of employer-provided health care coverage, the American people have developed a phobia of paying for health insurance themselves.

Arnold Kling

#59. And was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

R. H. Tawney

#60. I have had more than half a century of such happiness. A great deal of worry and sorrow, too, but never a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris, a lark, a bluebird, or a dewy morning glory.

Mary McLeod Bethune

#61. In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

Louis Finkelstein

#62. Fermina, he said, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#63. As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

#64. In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

Mary Augusta Ward

#65. A few years back I was asked if I would go and meet a director and his various acolytes, and it occurred to me halfway through the meeting that what I was doing was auditioning. And I thought, 'Well, hang on buddy. I've done half a century of this.'

Peter O'Toole

#66. I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.

Gore Vidal

#67. Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose.

Henri Poincare

#68. For more than half a century ... this Union has stood unshaken. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.

Zachary Taylor

#69. It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.

Ben Shapiro

#70. As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

Robert Gottlieb

#71. I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.

Tyne Daly

#72. For more than half a century, during which kingdoms and empires have fallen, this Union has stood unshaken. The patriots who formed it have long since descended to the grave; yet still it remains, the proudest monument to their memory ...

Zachary Taylor

#73. My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.

Kate Christensen

#74. We are about half a century away from being ecologically and economically bankrupt because of global warming

Andrew Simms

#75. The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#76. After doing psychology for half a century, my passion for all of it is greater than ever.

Philip Zimbardo

#77. You must remind me: "Edith! Speak up! Tell the story." It has been more than half a century. I suppose it is time.

Edith Hahn Beer

#78. There were the years - years of childhood and innocence - when I had believed that carminative meant - well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life - a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.

Aldous Huxley

#79. The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Steven Sinofsky

#80. East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

William Kirby

#81. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

Elizabeth McCracken

#82. Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.

Denis Hayes

#83. For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.

George W. Bush

#84. Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Nick Hornby

#85. [The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism.

Sean Hannity

#86. Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.

Murray Bookchin

#87. 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

#88. In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

Chen-Ning Yang

#89. Since creation of the E.U. a half century ago, Europe has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history.

John Bruton

#90. [Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century, a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies.

N. T. Wright

#91. I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.

Philip Kitcher

#92. The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

John Keegan

#93. I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

Neil Gaiman

#94. Edgar Wayburn has worked to preserve the most breath-taking examples of the American landscape. In fact, over the course of more than a half-century, both as President of the Sierra Club and as a private citizen, he has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.

William J. Clinton

#95. A half century ago Herbert Wechsler could justify the legal right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the "universal judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims." That is not a universal judgment today.

Don Kates

#96. I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I'm still alive ...

Federico Garcia Lorca

#97. I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it's not anymore, but in the '50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it's more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.

Costa-Gavras

#98. I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst.

Robert Byrd

#99. American history offers no parallel to the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, spanning the first half century of the Republic ... The publication, in full and integrated form, of the remarkable correspondence between these two eminent men is a notable event.

Dumas Malone

#100. Besides, if you can spot a
house that contains, say, half a dozen to a dozen people, and just plop a "Johnson" right amidships, it generally means "exit house and people," which, I suppose, is a desirable object to be attained, according to twentieth century manners.

Bruce Bairnsfather