Top 100 Quotes About The 20th Century
#1. I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.
Terry Teachout
#3. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
Steven Pinker
#4. Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.
Clare Boothe Luce
#5. Don't be afraid of anything. We've seen so much suffering and evil in the 20th century and we got through it. We can go on. God is with us. God will help us. Trust Him.
Michael Novak
#6. Eisenhower is my choice as the American of the 20th Century. Of all the men I've studied and written about, he is the brightest and the best.
Stephen Ambrose
#7. Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the 20th century is that they tread the same path.
Winston Churchill
#8. The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.
John Keegan
#9. US common stock has yielded a higher return than bonds. However, price earnings ratios are much higher than they were for much of the 20th century, so it
Anonymous
#10. That's a chapter, the last chapter of the 20th, 20th, the 21st century that most of us would rather forget. The last chapter of the 20th century. This is the first chapter of the 21st century.
George W. Bush
#11. Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
Nick Harkaway
#12. But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.
Alan Arkin
#14. The Europe we are in the process of building is the Europe of the 21st century; it's not the Europe of the 20th century.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin
#15. History of India From Ancient Times to the 20th Century by William W. Hunter
William W. Hunter
#16. The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour.
Sara Sheridan
#17. The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.
Stephen Ambrose
#18. We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century.
Oriana Fallaci
#19. With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.
Jack Kemp
#20. The 20th century has been marked by cynicism, selfishness, greed, and the desire to please, all without changing the status quo. In the 21st century, we must resurrect solidarity and compassion.
Oscar Arias
#21. The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince, a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.
Aldous Huxley
#22. Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#23. Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.
Anthony Doerr
#24. The light may be fading on the 20th century, but the sun is still rising on America.
William J. Clinton
#25. The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom.
Jeff Sharlet
#26. In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#27. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
Wynton Marsalis
#28. 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
#29. I feel very strongly about contraception even though I know people say that, as a good Catholic girl, I shouldn't. But I disagree because I think one of the keys to women's progression in the 20th century is being able to control their fertility.
Cherie Blair
#30. The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's?
S. Jay Olshansky
#31. Young people and Indian people need to know that we existed in the 20th Century. We need to know who our heroes are and to know what we have done and accomplished in this century other than what Olympic athletes Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills have done.
Russell Means
#32. Not only did she [Marilyn Monroe] master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century.
Gail Levin
#33. The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.
Ken Follett
#34. For me, the Dennis Wilson story is a quintessential You Must Remember This story because it's one of these stories that people never talk about, don't really think about, and it's forgotten within this major thing that is thought to be this cataclysmic event of the 20th century.
Karina Longworth
#35. Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.
Harry Shearer
#36. How to have a successful relationship Factoid: "Successful relationships" were invented in the 20th century along with washing powder and consumerism. Like washing powder, the concept has evolved so you no longer need to separate the whites.
Adam Douglas
#37. It was a different social structure. I'd go to [David] Bailey's for dinner at 10:30. There were always girls there and a house full of ... I don't know, anybody. Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper ... And there I am sitting down with these creatures of the 20th century, and it was normal to us.
Manolo Blahnik
#38. The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense. Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century.
Victor Davis Hanson
#39. I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.
Rachel Kushner
#40. Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century.
Daniel Kleppner
#41. The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.
A. Hunter Dupree
#42. We are in the final stages of egoic madness. Almost the whole world is fighting each other. We witnessed the final stages of egoic madness in the 20th century, and even now it still is playing itself out. It has not quite come to an end yet.
Eckhart Tolle
#43. The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a social role for men.
David Blankenhorn
#44. 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
#45. We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.
Edgar Mitchell
#46. The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to the U.S., and the 21st century belongs to China. Invest accordingly.
Warren Buffett
#47. I can claim to have made the daily life of the 20th Century more beautiful.
Raymond Loewy
#48. In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.
Joshua Bell
#49. One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.
Thomas Sowell
#50. 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
#51. Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument.
Ellis Marsalis Jr.
#52. Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.
Ray Manzarek
#53. I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.
Walter Murch
#54. To some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business.
Susan Cain
#55. I think the inhabitants of the past are fighting hard to keep the rents they acquired in the 20th century.
Michael Bennet
#56. Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.
Patricia Churchland
#57. The car was the iPhone of the 20th century. Kids these days don't have to drive anymore. They just go there virtually.
Jay Leno
#58. The sexual revolution produced cultural convulsions that were unparalleled in the 20th century. The female sex was historically sexualized and required to have orgasms for the first time. Sexual "deviants," particularly homosexuals, achieved partial emancipation.
Volkmar Sigusch
#59. G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else.
Dale Ahlquist
#60. By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.
Sylvia Earle
#61. A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.
Abraham Flexner
#62. When you have schools that are operating in the 20th century, and we're trying to prepare our children for the 21st century, even those children know they are not educated in the right way.
Donna Edwards
#63. We all know that Social Security is one of this country's greatest success stories in the 20th century.
Mitch McConnell
#64. In fact, the 20th century I think was the most fascinating century and the whole of man civilization because so much happened.
Joan Collins
#65. [Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Jeffrey Rosen
#66. The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
Adam Hochschild
#67. Between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68
Steven Pinker
#68. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
Warren Buffett
#69. Indeed, we Jews were at the leading edge of communist totalitarianism, one of the most murderous movements of the 20th century.
Barbara Amiel
#70. I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.
Christiane Amanpour
#71. Charlie Chaplin is the greatest artist of the 20th century. He takes me from laughter to tears in seconds. And he was one of the very first funny men. It's like the original violins were made in Cremona and there's never been any better since. Sometimes the best come right off the bat.
Emo Philips
#72. The 20th century was the time when the world turned to use of fossil fuels and the 21st century will be the century of the renewables.
Lester R. Brown
#73. I firmly believed that with the breadth of knowledge now makes it impossible for someone to be a polymath in the 20th century-until I met Dr.Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad.
Abdus Salam
#74. The way he's swinging the bat, he won't get a hit until the 20th century.
Jerry Coleman
#75. If children are studying the 20th century, I'm in their text books.
Paul McCartney
#76. Well, the first thing I had to do was to read a lot. First of all, about education ... and looking at education from the Middle Ages right through to the 20th Century. The second major area was country life in the 19th Century, which I don't know much about these days.
Michael Haneke
#77. Judge Samuel Alito was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. Our state has a legacy of producing outstanding jurists, most notably the late William J. Brennan, who ushered in our nation's recommitment to civil rights in the latter half of the 20th century.
Frank Lautenberg
#78. It is my opinion that the 21st century will be the century of play, and the heteroglossic activity of artists in the 20th century has been the forecast.
Brian Sutton-Smith
#79. Nikola Tesla Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century
Sean Patrick
#80. I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
Terry Pratchett
#81. Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship.
William L. Jenkins
#82. 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
#83. The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.
Stephane Hessel
#84. Peptic ulcers became more common in the 20th century at the same time that these theories of Freud and other psychoanalysts became popular. And somehow those meshed, and this tradition emerged that ulcers were caused by stress or turmoil in one's life.
Barry Marshall
#85. I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.
Quincy Jones
#86. 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
#87. At the turn of the 20th century, the disparity in literacy here in the U.S. largely came down to race. Nearly half of minorities at that time - 45 percent - were illiterate, while 94 percent of white citizens were literate.
Peter Diamandis
#88. Nostalgia is a longing for home," Svedana Boym writes, "that no longer exists or has never existed." In the 20th century, that longing, she adds, quoting historians Jean Starobinski and Michael Roth, had "shrunk to the longing for one's childhood.
Dan LeRoy
#89. In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.
Stephen Ambrose
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Humanistic values of equality and equal rights for all nations and individuals as crystallized in the principles of the United Nations Charter are mankind's great achievements in the 20th century.
Tran Duc Luong
#93. 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
#95. The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.
Alex Carey
#96. 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
#98. The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.
Howard Hodgkin
#99. I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century.
Alejo Carpentier
#100. I like living in the 20th century ... to me the world has never been more beautiful. I am trying to paint the real world I live in, as beautifully as I can with my own eyes.
Jeffrey Smart
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
