Twentieth Century Quotes

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.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

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.

Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century – freedom against Communism – so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

To have the ability to destroy all and not to do it was one of the hard tests humanity passed – but only just – in the middle of the twentieth century.

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.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

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

The twentieth century may well find historical status as the epoch in which man began to study himself as a scientific phenomenon.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

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

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.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

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.

Contrary to what we learn from progressives in education and the media, the history of the Democratic Party well into the twentieth century is a virtually uninterrupted history of thievery, corruption, and bigotry.

The history of the twentieth century – America’s century! – has been pretty much a history of rising prices.

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

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.

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.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

Although images of perfection in people’s personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies – utopian images – can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

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.

During the twentieth century, men fought on behalf of nationalism. Yet the wars they fought were also engendered by dislocations in world markets and by social revolution stimulated by the coming of the industrial age.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

During the second half of the twentieth century, I had the privilege of living through years of intensive erudition, and I realized that Canadians, located in the northernmost region of this hemisphere, were always respectful towards our country.

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.

That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I’m loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.

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

On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.

It’s been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century had produced a literature in Ireland that kept a tense distance from the sources of faith – and for good reason. Irish writing had suffered a terrible censorship in the twentieth century.

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.

At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication.

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.

As much as any woman of the twentieth century, Madam Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women’s place in American society.

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.

It is a startling and solemnizing fact that even as late as the twentieth century, the Great Command of Jesus Christ to carry the Gospel to all mankind is still so largely unfulfilled.

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

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.

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

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.

Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.

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.

The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.

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.

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.

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.

When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.

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.

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.

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

For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.