Top 100 Quotes About The Twentieth Century
#1. All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them in a clash of iron and a shriek of steam.
Ken Follett
#2. The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.
Saul Bellow
#3. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both
Timothy Snyder
#4. The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
Simone Weil
#5. This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.
Tom Robbins
#6. Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust
#7. Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.
Michael Arlen
#8. Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge to make the world safe for democracy. As we enter the twenty-first century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.
Fareed Zakaria
#9. Me? I'm the king of the twentieth century. I'm the bogeyman. The villain ... The black sheep of the family.
Alan Moore
#10. There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.
Harold E. Varmus
#11. If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.
Noam Chomsky
#12. The "evils of faction" theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the "muckrakers" at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton's contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.
Edward S. Greenberg
#13. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
Ray Bradbury
#14. Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
#15. The very quality of books to read and facts to master with which the twentieth-century man is confronted encourages him to think broadly and superficially about much, but hinders him from thinking deeply and thoroughly about anything.
J.I. Packer
#16. At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.
Philip Nelson
#17. I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.
James Howard Kunstler
#18. The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#19. Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century
Rick Bragg
#20. If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
Douglas Rushkoff
#21. Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.
Peter Lewis Allen
#22. In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
Julio Cortazar
#23. Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language.
Jerome Kern
#24. Of course, if there should be war, it wouldn't last long - not in the twentieth century; and no one wants it. There would be, perhaps, a few skirmishes on the frontiers, and then everything would be arranged diplomatically.
Marie Van Vorst
#25. There is one fault that I must find
With the twentieth century.
And I'll put it in a couple of words;
Too adventury.
What I'd like would be some nice dull monotony
If anyone's gotony.
Ogden Nash
#26. The normal background-noise type of guilt that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century,
Douglas Adams
#27. THE old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh ... And the same thing is happening to my generation.
Dambudzo Marechera
#28. That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.
Mark Morris
#29. The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present. Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the twentieth century.
Manolo Blahnik
#30. 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
#31. Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century.
Abhijit Naskar
#32. a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly - and with very limited funds.
John Kennedy Toole
#33. Exile ... might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century.
Phyllis Chesler
#34. If political scientists couldn't predict the downfall of the Soviet Union - perhaps the most important event in the latter half of the twentieth century - then what exactly were they good for?
Nate Silver
#35. The modern rise of Alzheimer's Disease in the twentieth century is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of success. Success in living long enough to see that disease expressed.
S. Jay Olshansky
#36. Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.
Michael Mandelbaum
#37. Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century!
Elie Wiesel
#38. I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.
Pete Seeger
#39. The twentieth century must be a century of the Blessed Sacrament if it means to be a century of resurrection and of life
Pope Leo XIII
#40. The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.
Charles Baxter
#41. As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.
Susan Vreeland
#42. Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
Rush Limbaugh
#43. The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.
Bill Henson
#44. The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
#45. The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic ... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
Russell Baker
#46. I was like one of those people who is allergic to the twentieth century ... I'd been brought up to think there was some order to things, but there was no safety net. Doctors accused me of being mad.
Peter Wolf
#47. One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends.
Caryl Rivers
#48. As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
Will Self
#49. It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.
Alex Carey
#50. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.
Raoul Vaneigem
#51. Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.
Kenneth Waltz
#52. Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
Robertson Davies
#53. As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
Thomas Sowell
#54. 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
#55. We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#56. The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.
James Joll
#57. The account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#58. This system, in which paper money is worth only a fraction of its stated value in gold or silver, was employed in the United States into the twentieth century. Then
Mark Sundeen
#59. It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants
of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the
realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and
abstruse books of philosophy.
Czeslaw Milosz
#60. Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism "capitalism with the gloves off," meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.
Noam Chomsky
#61. The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
Gertrude Stein
#62. 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
#63. Shina is the Japanese appellation for China most commonly used during the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II the name for China reverted to chugoku (Middle Kingdom), a common name from before the Meiji Restoration (1868).4
Stefan Tanaka
#64. The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.
Robert Hass
#65. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Tom Standage
#66. As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.
Steve Erickson
#67. To kill a man will be considered as disgusting [in the twentieth century] as we in this day consider it disgusting to eat one.
Andrew Carnegie
#68. Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.
Benito Mussolini
#69. How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,
Muriel Spark
#70. This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.
Lionel Barrymore
#71. If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.
Barbara Kingsolver
#72. A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
Cyril Connolly
#73. Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.
John Lahr
#74. In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.
Susan Sontag
#75. The twentieth-century scholar G. B. Harrison, believing the woman to have been black-skinned, proposed a prostitute named Lucy Morgan;
Paul Edmondson
#76. I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#77. It is easy to be mindless in America, because dreaming of and living for a better tomorrow is the American way ... The problem is, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have gotten so good at living for tomorrow that most of us spend very little time in the present.
Barbara De Angelis
#78. The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.
Anzia Yezierska
#80. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing.
Michel Houellebecq
#81. Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.
Dennis Cooper
#82. Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the world.
Timothy J. Keller
#83. In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.
Ruth Glick
#84. There is no one left," McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America's woes at the turn of the twentieth century, "none but all of us.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#85. The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.
Joseph Jacobs
#86. The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book.
Alec-Tweedie
#87. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#88. The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.
Rheta Childe Dorr
#89. Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.
Hunter S. Thompson
#90. No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.
Charles R. Morris
#91. She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.
Jonathan Lethem
#92. The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?
Brigid Brophy
#93. The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.
Lawrence Goodwyn
#94. The self-help movement that began in the latter half of the twentieth century suffers particularly from this flaw, for the personal and interpersonal skills it seeks to cultivate are almost always designed to get us more of what we think we want, rather than to bring about a change of heart.
C. Terry Warner
#95. The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
#96. It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.
Bill Bryson
#97. In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.
Ravi Zacharias
#98. I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world ...
Nazim Hikmet
#99. Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When
David Quammen
#100. The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.
John Ortberg
