Quotes About Twentieth Century

#1. As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.

Robert A. Dahl

#2. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#3. This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

Immanuel Wallerstein

#4. Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.

Whitaker Chambers

#5. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.

Rodney Stark

#6. ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.

Jennifer Senior

#7. Until the twentieth century, the T-shirt's role was strictly to form a barrier between a man's body and the more valuable clothing he actually wanted the world to see.

Tim Gunn

#8. With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.

Ralph Adams Cram

#9. Twentieth century man must boldly reach out ... And purposefully strive to discover the hidden secrets of our universe.

John Young

#10. Christian researcher George Barna concludes, "American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century because Jesus' modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus.

Skye Jethani

#11. Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Peter Medawar

#12. 'Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

John Lahr

#13. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#14. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

Salman Rushdie

#15. But our world at the end of the twentieth century has so much destruction without Christian artists so emphasizing the minor theme in the total body of their work that they add to the poorness and destruction of our generation.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#16. Said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense.

Harper Lee

#17. Because the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue.

Dalai Lama

#18. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

J.G. Ballard

#19. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.

Roger Scruton

#20. Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

Elie Wiesel

#21. Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.

Michel Houellebecq

#22. I got good notice from that show, and on the last day of filming Townies, Twentieth Century Fox called wanting to meet with me about a development deal.

Jenna Elfman

#23. Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Al Alvarez

#24. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Werner Herzog

#25. The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.

Richard L. Currier

#26. The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.

Milton Friedman

#27. Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba.

George Gilder

#28. I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#29. All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.

Malcolm Gladwell

#30. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Michael Behe

#31. Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!' Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, 'Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite'.

C.S. Lewis

#32. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!

William Attwood

#33. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

Henry Kissinger

#34. By the end of the Twentieth Century, taxation will be reduced to a minimum, the entire world will be open to trade, and there will be no need of a standing army.

Erastus Wiman

#35. For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

James Gleick

#36. During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.

Charles Wheelan

#37. I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

Penelope Wilton

#38. It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature.

Frederick Rolfe

#39. In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.

Victor Hugo

#40. Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.

Thomas Szasz

#41. Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

William McKinley

#42. How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?

Christian Wiman

#43. I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

Bing Crosby

#44. The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically - and even messianically - driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as "scientific planning.

Paul Edward Gottfried

#45. Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky.

Guillaume Apollinaire

#46. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

#47. All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on "calculating machines" had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She

Isaac Asimov

#48. The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

Geoffrey Nunberg

#49. We may be living in the twentieth century, in resplendent sophistication. But deep down, most of us find ourselves still in the Stone Age of superstition.

Helen Hayes

#50. The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

James Howard Kunstler

#51. Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#52. Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.

Kenneth Scott Latourette

#53. As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.

Pankaj Mishra

#54. Rob chuckles, I'm not some sparkly-skinned, jealous, child whose sensibilities are still stuck at the turn of the twentieth century. Eve, I can adapt. If we survived the sixties I promise you we can survive learning to share the most important person in either of our long lives.

Angela Louise McGurk

#55. She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

David Remnick

#56. The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Norman Mailer

#57. it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.

David S. Rose

#58. One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.

Jack The Ripper

#59. The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Robin G. Collingwood

#60. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.

Freeman Dyson

#61. Why is life at this point in the twentieth century so focused upon the very beginning of life and the very end of life? What about the 80 years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?

Will Smith

#62. The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

#63. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of "loser" people on the larger economy.

Nancy Isenberg

#64. The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century.

Walter Isaacson

#65. J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike.

Jeffrey K. Zeig

#66. Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century.

Alan J. Heeger

#67. The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

Stephen Hawking

#68. I played ten injury-free years between the ages of 12 and 22. Then, suddenly, it seemed like I was allergic to the twentieth century.

Nigel Melville

#69. In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Pat Conroy

#70. These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Miguel De Unamuno

#71. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.

David Mitchell

#72. The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy.

Gary Zukav

#73. The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

Ron Silver

#74. 'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

William T. Vollmann

#75. Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in detail the most intimate aspects of personal life, while maintaining an almost prudish reserve concerning the political significance of family life.

Mary Ann Glendon

#76. The only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously,

David Bentley Hart

#77. Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children.

Jim Butcher

#78. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.

George Orwell

#79. Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.

Arthur Kroker

#80. The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything.

Louis Dudek

#81. 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

#82. In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.

Timothy Snyder

#83. I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'

Susan Minot

#84. 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

#85. We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet.

Michael Palin

#86. There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century.

G.K. Chesterton

#87. In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

Charles Petzold

#88. Does the twentieth-century disciple have a right to discard the cultural mandate, twice given to the human race by Jehovah himself? Are we justified in turning the world and culture over to the enemies of God How far does the kingship of Christ extend?

Henry R. Van Til

#89. By the late twentieth century, Jefferson's windfall would be feeding much of the world.

Edward E. Baptist

#90. The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.

Ishmael Reed

#91. The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

Tom Brokaw

#92. The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

Adlai E. Stevenson

#93. 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

#94. It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.

Philippe Aries

#95. Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend.

John Gray

#96. Dom Helder Camara, a twentieth-century bishop in Brazil, said, When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.

Shane Claiborne

#97. Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century.

John Rothenstein

#98. The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Willard Van Orman Quine

#99. Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society.

Carl Bernstein

#100. The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

Alain Aspect