Popular quotes about Century! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 27
Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.
Joe BidenBecause the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue.
Dalai LamaThese strengths, and our civilization in general, have reached an apogee with the end of the apocalyptic threats of the Cold War and the end - or at least waning - of less successful, and ultimately less "just," political and economic systems. At the turn of the 21st century we appear to be entering our greatest century, a golden age. The challenge that we face is similar to that of the Classic Maya civilization: we have set in motion a "runaway train" of success.
Arthur DemarestA dining club which I was involved in at Oxford University invited Sir Isaiah Berlin to dinner, who I believe was probably the greatest liberal philosopher in the 20th century. I sat beside him and we spoke about liberal philosophy and the events of the 20th century all night over dinner - it was unforgettable!
George BrandisIn the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.
Ishmael ReedIt is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.
Ron PaulShould an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.
Bernadette DevlinThen I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
Jorge Luis BorgesWriters in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.
Pankaj MishraThe kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
Guy de MaupassantA century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build
Maurice SamuelThe first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.
Philippe AriesYou only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?
Robert HassAll we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.
Frederic G. KenyonThe young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.
Isaac AsimovOn a train from Shimla to Delhi, there was a halt in one of the stations. The train stopped by for few minutes as usual. Sachin was nearing century, batting on 98. The passengers, railway officials, everyone on the train waited for Sachin to complete the century. This Genius can stop time in India!
Peter RoebuckMost of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.
Pankaj MishraThe vast majority of those of Scots lineage living in the Ulster counties in the 18th century had come across, or their people had come across, in the 1690s. And they were victims of famine. Over that decade, 30000-50000 people were fleeing from that disaster. In terms of per capita loss, it was of the same order of magnitude as the Irish famine (of the 19th century).
Tom DevineIn real estate you can avoid ever having to pay a capital gains tax, decade after decade, century after century. When you sell a property and make a capital gain, you simply turn around and buy a new property. The gain is not taxed. It's called "preserving your capital investment" - which goes up and up in value with each transaction.
Michael HudsonSix mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
Marcus Tullius CiceroAs a journalist, I never isolated myself. I was a journalist at a daily newspaper and every day I went out on the street. Every day I had contact with people. I interviewed the most important writers of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century, from Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marguerite Yourcenar to Christa Wolf.
Maria Teresa HortaThe leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world - nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters - can and is happening here at home.
Llewellyn RockwellI feel like we're between two great possibilities: we're either going to turn things around, and in this generation see the rising sun of a new moral dedication in America, or we're going to lose the struggle for that moral renewal, throw away the basic principles on which our life and civilization is based, and head toward a new century that will make the 20th century look like a dress rehearsal for evil.
Alan KeyesWe do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction.
Dora RussellI donโt mind the disapproving ones so much. Itโs the tolerant ones I canโt stand, the ones who smile at Rose, who speak to her ever so slowly and gently. They donโt realize how very intelligent Rose really is. Theyโre just terrifically pleased with themselves. Look at me! they all but shout. See how broad-minded I am! How wonderfully progressive, how fantastically twentieth century!
Franny BillingsleyDemocrtitus, in the fifth century B.C. had declared that all the world was composed of only two elements: atomes and the void. This reduction of the myriad of forms to only two was the ultimate in dualistic reasoning. Christianity adopted dualism when it created the strict division between good and evil and heaven and hell.
Leonard ShlainI did a lot of work with early 20th century attitudes, the kind of superficial notions and behavior that prompt people who don't know history very well to think that "people were different back then" - but beneath all that are characters who react in ways that we can all recognize, and will always be able to recognize.
James VanceA century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
James BuchanI think thereโs a really selfish part of me that wishes I had the tools that I had today in the context of a designer practicing in the middle part of the 20th century when creating a single expression of an idea was the norm.
Khoi VinhIf something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they'd approve and I'd deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.
Robert AltmanAs man reaches out toward the twenty-first century, he will learn to be suspicious of all ideas that are not formulated so that they can be tested by observation. He will realize that the history of human thought shows that the ideas of which we are surest are the ones we most need to test. He will realize that his common sense only mirrors his training and experience. What seems natural and right to him is usually a reflection of the conditions under which he spent his first decade of life.
Jacque FrescoThe twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example. This professionalization is a tragedy. Hand in hand with this - and I have no idea what the causal relations are - there has been a rise in the idea of The Author, so that today one often has the impression that what's selling the book is not the book but the author.
Zia Haider RahmanNearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.
Jerry SaltzWe forget that the nineteenth century often turned work into sport. We, in contrast, often turn sport into work.
Geoffrey BlaineyI like variety, which is frustrating. But I've always been picky. I was afraid Pirates would be too much like Twentieth Century, broad comedy. But my agent talked me into it. I was spoiled by the range of a repertory theater.
Kevin KlineA great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI understand how difficult it can be for an African-American in todayโs society. In fact, I can relate to black people very well indeed. My ancestors once owned slaves, and it is in my lineage to work closely with the black community. However, just because they were freed over a century ago doesnโt mean they can now be freeloaders. They need to be told to work hard, and the incentives just arenโt there for them anymore. When Iโm president I plan to work closely with the black community to bring a sense of pride and work ethic back into view for them.
Mitt RomneyIf you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.
Henry David ThoreauOriginally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience.
Jerry GoldsmithAnd the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Walter PaterA precious, mouldering pleasure 't is, to meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege I think.
Emily DickinsonIf you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.
Timothy KellerThroughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.
Stephen KinzerThe typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.
P. J. O'RourkeWhat a lot of folks feel - and some of the other commenters have mentioned this - is that there isn't a very clear way for somebody who's working-class, who is middle-income to really get ahead in 21st century America. That implicates our education system. It also implicates our local and regional economies. And I think that folks will expect Trump to fix a lot of those things. But, of course, it's a really tall order, and it's not going to happen overnight.
James VanceSimplicity survives the changes of fashion. Women of chic are wearing now dresses they bought from me in 1936. Fit the century, forget the year.
ValentinaThe age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.
Francois Rabelais