Quotes About 20th Century History

#1. The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

Tom Brokaw

#2. Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

#3. All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

Terry Teachout

#4. What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

Emir Kusturica

#5. Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination.

Eckhart Tolle

#6. Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.

Nicholas Kristof

#7. The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.

Alister E. McGrath

#8. At the end of a century that has seen
the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,
the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

Joseph Sobran

#9. It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history

Margaret Beckett

#10. History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

Daniel J. Boorstin

#11. The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.

Arthur Herman

#12. If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

Theodore Dalrymple

#13. Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

Noam Chomsky

#14. We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

Todd Gitlin

#15. The 20th century was a century in which human rights were infringed upon in numerous parts of the world, and Japan also bears responsibility in that regard. I believe that we have to look at our own history with humility and think about our responsibility.

Shinzo Abe

#16. It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century.

John McCain

#17. What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

Bertrand Piccard

#18. The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour.

Sara Sheridan

#19. History of India From Ancient Times to the 20th Century by William W. Hunter

William W. Hunter

#20. Gabriel Wilensky's book is an excellent introduction into the history of antisemitism in Europe. His words will rightly unsettle those who have yet to come to grips with Christianity's role in shaping European attitudes and policies towards Jews into the 20th century.

Jonathan Friedman

#21. You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

Tony Judt

#22. Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.

A.E. Samaan

#23. So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.

Steven Pinker

#24. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

Gregory Benford

#25. Nothing in recent history makes any sense without a deep understanding of WWII and The Holocaust.

A.E. Samaan

#26. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

Jared Diamond

#27. Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.

Don Tapscott

#28. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#29. The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.

Tariq Ali

#30. Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.

Sylvia Earle

#31. My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

Donald Tusk