Half Century Quotes

#1. Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.

Jimmy Carter

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. At the end of the first half-century of engine-driven flight, we are confronted with the stark fact that the historical significance of aircraft has been primarily military and destructive.

Charles Lindbergh

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.

R.K. Narayan

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

John Bruton

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. A half century of living should put a good deal into a person's face besides a few wrinkles and some unwelcome folds around the chin.

Frances Parkinson Keyes

#16. If adapted to the unique requirements of various regions and peoples of the world, such economic pluralism could have a greater global impact over the next fifty years than the collectivist economics of Marxism and neo-Marxism have had during the half century just past.

Robert Dickson Crane

#17. The history of the last half century is accordingly in large measure a history of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#18. The US is indeed a terrorist nation ... It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.

Bill Ayers

#19. If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it's been the running feminist critique of masculinity.

Jack Donovan

#20. If our animosities are born out of fear, then confident generosity is born out of hope. One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the single most powerful trampoline of progress.

Aga Khan IV

#21. Herzl had said that attracting the Jewish diaspora would be a slow process, but after a half century as a nation, according to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, only 17 percent of American Jews have ever visited Israel.

Mark Kurlansky

#22. If they're still sullen and whiny when they pass nineteen, they probably always will be. Another half century of bitching and moaning about bosses and wives and how the other guys got all the luck. Riggs. Charlie Riggs.

Paul Levine

#23. Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but pass?. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

Phyllis McGinley

#24. 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

#25. There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century.

Arthur Erickson

#26. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.

Theodore Roosevelt

#27. The U.S. has fallen behind with tax policies that haven't been updated in a half-century.

Rob Portman

#28. A half-century after racing the Russians to the moon, the U.S. is barely suiting up in the international race to secure interests in the Arctic.

Rick Larsen

#29. If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour.

Christopher Caldwell

#30. For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

Thomas Steinbeck

#31. Jazz has been the voice of freedom for so many countries over the past half century,

Herbie Hancock

#32. If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.

Martin Seligman

#33. It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

Lauren Groff

#34. After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.

Henri Matisse

#35. English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

Mary Augusta Ward

#36. Sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century.

Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

#37. In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

Will Self

#38. Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half-century.

David Rockefeller

#39. A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

Karen Abbott

#40. But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

Anna Quindlen

#41. Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn't allow us to forget.

Irena Sendler

#42. As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.

Robert Bork

#43. As the leader of Southeast Asia's oldest democracy, I am always keen to share our experiences. In the half-century since independence, we have found that steady reform is the best way to secure lasting stability. It is a process that continues in Malaysia to this day.

Najib Razak

#44. 'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.

Kate Christensen

#45. The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

Michael Shermer

#46. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#47. Even now, over a half-century later, the engraved words stirred emotions in him he would rather not confront.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#48. Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#49. We have salads, some other beverages. But in reality, it's still fundamentally the same business. The most likely thing the next person will buy is a sandwich and a soft drink. After a half-century of glacial change, we're still pretty much the same business.

Fred DeLuca

#50. Famous for his 'Maverick' Western series in the 1950s and 'The Rockford Files' in the '70s, and in movies like 'The Great Escape' and 'Grand Prix' in between, James Garner played amiable, independent characters for more than a half-century and never lost his comforting, enduring appeal.

Richard Corliss

#51. face, conclusively prove that the enormous progress made in the Highlands during the last half century, and now rapidly going on, is mainly due to our Highland Sports. A great amount of nonsense has been said and written on this question, and an attempt made to hold grouse and deer

Various

#52. The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

James Buchan

#53. For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it.

Peter Beinart

#54. We've seen in the last half century an incredible shift. This is just an extraordinary time to be alive.

Neale Donald Walsch

#55. At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.

Bette Davis

#56. I have learned as much in the last three years as in any other comparable period of my life, but with an added realisation of how little over a half century of study one has in fact managed to learn of the whole range of economic policy issues.

James Meade

#57. Men o' war were to be a part of the fabric of my life for the next half-century.

Lord Mountbatten

#58. Confirming John Roberts would endanger much of the progress made by the nation in civil rights over the past half century.

Ralph G. Neas

#59. I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.

Michael Eric Dyson

#60. Nietzsche lampooned the romantics of his day (a half century later), noting that "they muddy the waters to make them look deep.

Robert Solomon

#61. I'm grateful for the evangelical resurgence we've seen across the world in the last half-century or so. It truly has been God's doing.

Billy Graham

#62. The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.

Lester R. Brown

#63. The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

John Maynard Keynes

#64. Then you get to the last half of the 20th century, Americans are getting very skeptical about their leaders and their institutions, and another place that is affected is parties and conventions.

Michael Beschloss

#65. 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

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

Ralph Nader

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

Sophie Swetchine

#68. What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.

Moses Finley

#69. I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

Alexander McCall Smith

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.

Ernst W. Mayr

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

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

Gustave Flaubert

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

Sean Hannity

#79. 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

#80. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#82. 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

#83. [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

#84. It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century.

Jeff VanderMeer

#85. Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

C.P. Snow

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And

Anne Applebaum

#93. 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

#94. I'm enthralled by the national yearning that the Russians had during the 50s and 60s. The whole century was pretty rough for them. They suffered genocide, war, poverty, and half the population was sent to labor camps. But they were determined to get into space first.

George Meyer

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. An illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half.

Edith Hall

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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