What Century Quotes

#1. It was just a magnificent, India-ink night of moonlit clouds below and glimpses of the shimmering sea. What century are you in? he longed to ask her.

Suzanne Stroh

#2. My forte is playing drunks down the ages. When my agent rings me about a role, I don't ask what the part is, but what century it's in.

Johnny Vegas

#3. Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example.

Thomas Browne

#4. If you think of 'Liberty Valance' or 'The Searchers,' there are moments in there that you'll never, ever forget ... And it does not matter what century you are from.

Kevin Costner

#5. You really should take up boxing, or fencing - "
"Fencing? What century are you from?"
" - or solving crimes."
"Are you prescribing me your company, Doctor?"
"Detective, you can read me like a book." She lifted her glass, and I clinked mine against it.

Brittany Cavallaro

#6. Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.

William J. Clinton

#7. What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.

Moses Finley

#8. To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.

Ronald Wright

#9. When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn't told me.

James Fenton

#10. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980s: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.

Khaled Hosseini

#11. It's embarrassing that we're in the 21st century and we don't even know what makes gravity work. I'm getting older and thinking maybe I should tackle more than the mundane. I may fail, but at least I will have tried.

Woody Norris

#12. What could I say? ( ... ) That I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all? ( ... ) Encouraging me the way he had, knowing that there was no new century for me, no new life for this girl.

Jacqueline Kelly

#13. Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#14. 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

#15. I noticed whenever you call information, 411, there's always a computer voice, and they go, 'What number would you like? City and state, please.' 'Yeah, I'd like the number of Macy's in Century City, California.' 'Did you say 'pretzel nuggets'?

Andy Kindler

#16. I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health. Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?

Charlotte Bronte

#17. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.

Yuval Noah Harari

#18. Little did we guess that what has been called the century of the common man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries together in the history of the world.

Winston Churchill

#19. Jeanne de Chantal, seventeenth-century founder of the Order of the Visitation, said, No matter what happens, be gentle with yourself.

Shane Claiborne

#20. 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

#21. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.

David Foster Wallace

#22. What I enjoy doing is challenging stereotypes of what people believe a Tory must be. You don't have to say every Tory is in it for themselves - it's pathetic caricaturing that has no place in the 21st century, and if we can challenge that stereotype, then great.

Louise Mensch

#23. I long to see a radical shift in philanthropy that will come to characterize the 21st century. That is, a reclaiming of the root meaning of philanthropy: love of what it means to human.

Valaida Fullwood

#24. It is interesting to observe what the Cynic teaching became when it was popularized. In the early part of the third century B.C., the cynics were the fashion, especially in Alexandria. They published little sermons pointing out how easy it is to do without material possessions,

Bertrand Russell

#25. When life is good, enjoy it. But when life is hard, remember:
God gives good times and hard times, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. (Ecclesiastes 7:14, New Century Version)

Anonymous

#26. You receive in return what you plant with your words and your deeds.

Bethanee Epifani

#27. In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.

Elizabeth Peyton

#28. So then do you think it's true that he killed someone? And what about the part where he wishes he could die?"
"If it IS true that he killed someone, that's bad."
In any case, "it seems like something is bothering Shuji" was now a contender for the Understatement of the Century.

Mizuki Nomura

#29. For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

Tom Bissell

#30. It was in the eighteenth century that England became what (Adam) Smith called "a nation of shopkeepers" ... (p. 58)

Jerry Z. Muller

#31. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Nina Simone

#32. We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century,' and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.

Nina Fedoroff

#33. The most exciting breakthrough of the twenty-first century will occur not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human," said the futurist John Naisbitt.

Keith Ferrazzi

#34. Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#35. What is a Person? is a clear and comprehensive reconsideration of the meaning of human personhood as the central core of social structures. With breadth of intellect and balance of wisdom, Smith resets the frame of reflection for the most important discussions of the twenty-first century.

William B. Hurlbut

#36. Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

Alan Dean Foster

#37. Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn't be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.

Malcolm Gladwell

#38. Ninety-three was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century

Victor Hugo

#39. 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

#40. I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward.

Christopher Bollen

#41. I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.

Morris Gleitzman

#42. Recently I was reading somewhere or other an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.

George Orwell

#43. I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.

Jaye Davidson

#44. I'm not sure what's more worrying. The list of demands or the fact he seems unaware the French stopped using francs in the last century and that Africa is a continent?" - Jerome

Jamie Scallion

#45. Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.

Annie Besant

#46. It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

Matthew Stewart

#47. I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

Siri Hustvedt

#48. Amanuensis. That was the word she chose, and since it was straight out of the nineteenth century, her mother approved, relishing the blank stares she received when she told her lady guests what position her daughter had acquired with the State Poet Laureate.

Toni Morrison

#49. What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.

Dan Shaughnessy

#50. I don't know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.

Geena Davis

#51. [N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#52. The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.

Charles Clover

#53. Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn't make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn't make it the most important invention of the 20th century.

Ben Affleck

#54. In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#55. What happened to our nation on a September day set in motion the first great struggle of a new century. The enemies who struck us are determined and they are resourceful. They will not be stopped by a sense of decency or a hint of conscience
but they will be stopped.

George W. Bush

#56. Some people who visit my century home on the lake often comment on the billboards that obscure part of the view. I often tell them to look past the bad to see the good. Just like life. It's what we see and how we see it that matters.

Lynn Hones

#57. I guess it's kind of the obvious thing for me to do 'cuz it's what I grew up listening to. The songs growing up and everything kind of seem like old music to them, but to me, it's just ... good music. And of course I did grow up in England in the 21st Century and that does come into it as well.

George Ezra

#58. I'm lucky enough to have a kid with me who is actually really intellectually up with what's going on in the world and actually puts his money where his mouth is and goes and does something about it; he goes and talks about it. It livens you up a bit and it brings you into the 21st Century.

Ray Winstone

#59. Half a century goes by in what seems like a year. Don't waste an hour in boredom, son, or wishing for tomorrow.

Dean Koontz

#60. Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

Robert Wyatt

#61. The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West.

Henri Pirenne

#62. As we move into the 21st century, there's what the Bible calls a 'quickening of the spirit.'

Neale Donald Walsch

#63. They will wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most important century of their history.

G. Willow Wilson

#64. When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.

Claire Tomalin

#65. What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

Lynne Truss

#66. For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to inhabit for eight years.

Gary Locke

#67. To the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough, God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him. THE HISTORIES, HERODOTUS, FIFTH CENTURY B.C. Indians

Robert Greene

#68. Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.

Kate Williams

#69. Typical horror movies of the 1930s were often given a period setting in what looked like a kind of stylized 19th century ... the sense of 'elsewhen', of distance, lent to many of these movies by their settings. They exist, as it were, in a 19th century of the mind.

Andrew Tudor

#70. If we try to put together what we have learned in the twentieth century about the physical world, the clues point toward something profoundly different from our instinctive understanding of matter, space, and time.

Carlo Rovelli

#71. If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don't be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.

Andrew Dalby

#72. A revolution is called for, certainly. But not a political, an economic, or even a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.

Dalai Lama XIV

#73. I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.

Tom Waits

#74. We are in the 21st century; what are the kings or the queens doing in this century? They must remain in the past!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#75. My aim is to change people's perceptions of what a hat can look like in the 21st century.

Philip Treacy

#76. Because I had some roles that resonated with women, I immediately noticed that there were far more male characters than female characters in what we're showing little kids in the 21st century, which was stunning to me. But I couldn't find anybody else who noticed.

Geena Davis

#77. I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.

James L. Brooks

#78. One of the big weaknesses of the Conservative Party is not just their ignorance of and lack of effective response to the cost-of-living crisis but a more fundamental error about what makes for success in the 21st century.

Douglas Alexander

#79. Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans

Dean Cavanagh

#80. You held out your hand, and I took it without stopping to make sense of what I was doing. For the first time in almost a century, I felt hope.

Stephenie Meyer

#81. Your religious book(s) mentioned the power of mind thousands of years ago so WHY do you have to wait until the science proves it in the 21st century? Let others wait to realize/prove the facts not you.

Maddy Malhotra

#82. One of the most perplexing political questions of the late 20th century is how new democracies should punish deposed dictators and their associates. Victims cry for justice, but leaders of new regimes must decide to what extent it is possible, moral or prudent to pursue evildoers of the past.

Stephen Kinzer

#83. The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

Peter F. Drucker

#84. Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

Roland Barthes

#85. This is the 21st century, we are a highly evolved race, our capabilities are so great compared to what we are doing. We have been lulled into addiction and everything is built around it and you have to break out of it and think outside of the box.

Neil Young

#86. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#87. On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century ... First of all, what style should I employ?

Umberto Eco

#88. She stole a glance at Kevin Kimberly...No other man of her acquaintance ever boasted so smooth a shave or as shapely a haircut.

Nancy Paschal

#89. Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better ... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.

Gore Vidal

#90. Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself.

Paul Strathern

#91. What has been done is little - scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.

Agnes Mary Clerke

#92. Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.

Oscar Wilde

#93. Over time I began to realize that the level of cinema criticism in the last part of XX century in the United States was pretty low. The institution itself is not what it's supposed to be, and I realized that I didn't need to take that seriously.

George Lucas

#94. Geez what is it with these guys and their swords, why can't they just century up and get normal bad guy weapons?

Caitlyn Santi

#95. For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

Cynthia Daignault

#96. Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don't live this life, if we don't live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.

Anne Rice

#97. It was some time ago - in the twelfth century, as you humani measure time - a man from the land of the Scots. I do not remember his name." Both Sophie and Josh instinctively knew that Hekate was lying. "What happened to him?" Sophie asked. "He died." There was a peculiar high-pitched giggle.

Michael Scott

#98. I don't see what's so "romantic" about spending a week in a tropical paradise with your spouse whom you've already seen almost every day for the past quarter century.

Rachel Cohn

#99. Christianity is facing something of an identity crisis. Who are we to be to the twenty-first-century world? How should the church position itself in the postmodern culture? Through what cultural languages will the gospel be best communicated in this turbulent time?

Brett McCracken

#100. It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.

Larry Ellison