Popular quotes about Century! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 4
I think the twenty-first century happened, basically. That this century started on 9/11. And basically, it's been a century of counter reaction to globalization and the meritocracy. And a good century for 72 nations have gotten more authoritarian. We've had Brexit. We have Le Pen rising in France. We've just got a lot of these types all around the world. And the people who are suffering from globalization and the meritocracy are saying, "No more. You know, we get a voice too."
David BrooksI was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.
Christine JenningsIt is my belief that whereas the twentieth century has been a century of war and untold suffering, the twenty-first century should be one of peace and dialogue. As the continued advances in information technology make our world a truly global village, I believe there will come a time when war and armed conflict will be considered an outdated and obsolete method of settling differences among nations and communities.
Dalai LamaBecause the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue.
Dalai Lama... my century.. is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form.
Whittaker ChambersI'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people.
Alan GreenThe most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.
Peter DruckerThe most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.
Peter DruckerThe closing period of the fifteenth century witnessed the slow but sure increase of the churches of the Brethren. Although far from being unmolested, they yet enjoyed comparative rest. At the commencement of the sixteenth century their churches numbered two hundred in Bohemia and Moravia.
Ezra Hall GillettLast century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
Danny HillisWriters 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 MishraYou just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.
John F. KerryA 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 SamuelThere were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.
Kehinde WileyThe Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.
Jeanette WintersonI firmly believe that we who are alive and can think today-in the closing years of the 20th century-have a commitment to our species to make sure that the flicker of movement we have thus managed in space stays sufficiently kindled so that the people of the 21st century can build upon and extend the human abode from Earth to the cosmos beyond.
Paul LevinsonActually what is happening in the twenty-first century, this is the great century of migration, so we have people from all around the globe going all over the place, and they have to integrate into a society, that society that exists has to integrate with them. Both sides have to work at it. It's not a one-way thing.
Roma TearneYou had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
Milton FriedmanWe are in the 21st century; what are the kings or the queens doing in this century? They must remain in the past!
Mehmet Murat IldanThe 19th century Mormons, including some of my ancestors, were not eager to practice plural marriage. They followed the example of Brigham Young, who expressed his profound negative feelings when he first had this principle revealed to him. The Mormons of the 19th century who practiced plural marriage, male and female, did so because they felt it was a duty put upon them by God.
Dallin H. OaksOn 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 EcoDon't assume that the way that one searches and researches is the same from one era to another - it isn't. In the 19th century, most research was done by amateurs: either individuals who were rich or individuals who had a day job. In the 20th century, most researchers worked at universities or think tanks and received money from the government or from foundations to pursue their work. In our time, the sources of support and the locations for research may be quite different.
Howard GardnerWhen I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don't want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don't even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That's what I want.
Shirley ChisholmIt's very important to understand that 21st century authoritarian rule does not look like 20th century authoritarian rule. You're not going to have people in parade ground formations. You're not going to have a police state. You're not going to people with decorative armbands bullying people on the sidewalks. And the leaders won't stand at microphones for hours ranting at people. All of that is so 80 years ago.
David FrumI think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
David HockneyThe fork was invented sometime in the fifteenth century, I believe.โ โReally?โ she asked. โWere you there?โ His features blank, he looked up and asked, โWhat, for the invention of the fork or the fifteenth century?
Sherrilyn KenyonI think I was born with a sense of instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things my character has served me well it has made me. well, an eighteenth -century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.
Wendy LesserWe have again a strange gap. We have the big scientific discoveries around the second, third century BC. Then we have an invention of the so-called Arab system, the positional system of counting with zero dated to the eighth or ninth century.
Garry KasparovThe 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. ChestertonI believe the world benefits from American leadership. I believe this next century should be an American century.
Mitt RomneyI cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.
Edward BellamyIn 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 ShattuckSometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.
Salman RushdieThe 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist.
Dietrich BonhoefferModern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.
F. Scott FitzgeraldBismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
Robert D. KaplanAnd though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
E. L. DoctorowCombinatorial analysis, in the trivial sense of manipulating binomial and multinomial coefficients, and formally expanding powers of infinite series by applications ad libitum and ad nauseamque of the multinomial theorem, represented the best that academic mathematics could do in the Germany of the late 18th century.
Richard AskeyTo confound the tyranny of man there should exist for a century a third sex, both male and female, and stronger than men. This new sex would prove with the lash that men as well as women are made for its pleasure; and then you would hear men protesting against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex and admitting that strength should not be the sole rule of right. Just why do they refuse to grant the women the independence which they would demand from the third sex?
Charles FourierWhat I often do in my work is to take a great story, such as the Odyssey, the search for the Grail, the story of Jesus, or the story of the great peacemaker who helped create the Iroquois Confederacy in the 15th century. I then use these tales as templates upon which to weave psychological and spiritual exercises which allow us to open ourselves up to the larger venue of a story.
Jean HoustonIf we remain determined to shape a new and better world of separate, sovereign nations, this new century will be a happier one.
Alan CarubaFor most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful.
Gwynne DyerThe story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness. Thus the Western Empire died.
Adrian Goldsworthy[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
Barbara TuchmanI believe sans serif typefaces - today upheld as models of neutrality and legibility - were called "Grotesques" in the 19th century because people thought they were hideous. But now we're used to them.
Michael BierutThe initial 18th-, 19th-century intention was to give the less-educated lower classes a way to move up into this new, rising middle class, to enable them to fit in. So our view of language as being class-based is an unintended consequence of the drive to help educate rising businessmen.
Kory StamperThere is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.
Jean-Luc GodardNo one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talented man, that tumultuous time and this treasure of a game better than Howard Bryant. Together, they are an extraordinary combination, and the book Bryant has written gets to the heart of the complicated and dignified, patient and consistent genuine hero that is Henry Aaron.
Ken Burns