Quotes About Twentieth Century

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

Norman Mailer

#2. This concern for those left behind by the rise of what Pope Francis calls a "savage capitalism" is perhaps the defining mission of the church of the twentieth century, and our new millennium.

Simone Campbell

#3. This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.

Steven Johnson

#4. As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man.

Bruce Chatwin

#5. The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

Joseph Sobran

#6. At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.

Karen Armstrong

#7. 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

#8. The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#9. 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

#10. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
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Nina Sankovitch

#11. 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

#12. The late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.

Kurt Vonnegut

#13. 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.

#14. in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies - filed under Cotard's syndrome - I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self.

Peter Watts

#15. The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English's time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft of a rigorously exacting nature has been cast to the margins of the culture.

John McWhorter

#16. The twentieth-century scholar G. B. Harrison, believing the woman to have been black-skinned, proposed a prostitute named Lucy Morgan;

Paul Edmondson

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,

Muriel Spark

#23. In this twentieth century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.

Frederick Franck

#24. Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Benito Mussolini

#25. He looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Stephen King

#26. We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

Octavio Paz

#27. 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

#28. The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.

Kate Grenville

#29. Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

Leonard Nimoy

#30. Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

H.G.Wells

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.

Robert Hass

#34. In the late twentieth century, staying sober has become just as much an addiction as getting wasted.

Dennis Miller

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Gertrude Stein

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity.

Robert H. Schuller

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

Raoul Vaneigem

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends.

Caryl Rivers

#53. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.

Eckhart Tolle

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.

John Green

#57. The rhinoceros stood ... about five hundred yards away ... not a twentieth-century animal at all, but an odd, grim straggler from the Stone Age.

Winston Churchill

#58. Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language.

Jerome Kern

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Marcel Proust

#63. 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

#64. Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach. But he will need something more. He will need to overcome his disgust long enough to ponder the roots of this strange and puzzling phenomenon.

Mark Lilla

#65. 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

#66. A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

Garry Kasparov

#67. Me? I'm the king of the twentieth century. I'm the bogeyman. The villain ... The black sheep of the family.

Alan Moore

#68. There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

Harold E. Varmus

#69. I'm no goddam animal. I may be a stupid, fouled-up twentieth-century son of a bitch, but I'm no animal. Don't gimme that. I'm no animal.

J.D. Salinger

#70. If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

Noam Chomsky

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Salman Rushdie

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. Cruise through the gargantuan sites - YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! - and it's as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web's aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.

Virginia Heffernan

#77. 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

#78. After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century.

Pankaj Mishra

#79. 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

#80. Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century

Rick Bragg

#81. If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

Douglas Rushkoff

#82. 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

#83. We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said.
"Who isn't?

Ruth Ozeki

#84. Exactly what the great white eats in an emergency is a mystery ichthyologists solved by the late twentieth century after decades of investigation: whatever it wishes.

Michael Capuzzo

#85. 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

#86. Exile ... might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century.

Phyllis Chesler

#87. The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.

Bill Henson

#88. Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.

Rush Limbaugh

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

Adrienne Rich

#96. 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

#97. There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasn't heard it.

Helen Reddy

#98. History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.

Lawrence James

#99. 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

#100. 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