20th Century Quotes

• Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

  Jacques Yves Cousteau

  Damage Is Done, Earth, Century

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• If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.

  Carl Sagan

  Century, Biking, Tandem Bikes

  "Cosmos".

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• Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Business, Journey

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• In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

  Warren Buffett

  Business, Military, War

  "Buy American. I Am." by Warren Buffett, www.nytimes.com. October 16, 2008.

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• I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

  David Hockney

  Thinking, Doubt, Century

  "'Cooler than Warhol, more enduring than Freud'". Interview with Jonathan Jones, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2006.

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• Young people and Indian people need to know that we existed in the 20th Century. We need to know who our heroes are and to know what we have done and accomplished in this century other than what Olympic athletes Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills have done.

  Russell Means

  Hero, Athlete, People

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• At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

  Brian Eno

  Art, Ambition, Painting

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• Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Health, Psychics, Disease

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.

  Alex Carey

  Wisdom, Democracies Have, Australia Day

  Alex Carey, Andrew Lohrey (1997). “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty”, p.18, University of Illinois Press

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• The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century-sex and paranoia.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Sex, Moving

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• Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

  John Updike

  Century, Said

  John Updike (2009). “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, p.188, Random House

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• Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.

  Clare Boothe Luce

  Business, Social Unrest, Done

  "Ann Coulter, the pin-up model" by Elana Schor, www.theguardian.com. November 17, 2008.

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• It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century

  Lawrence Summers

  Europe, Would Be, Shapes

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• The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Democracies Have, Australia Day

  Noam Chomsky (1997). “World Orders, Old and New”, p.89, Pluto Press

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• More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.

  Dennis Prager

  Tyrants, Done, Dictator

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.

  William Lyon Phelps

  Life, Spiritual, Disease

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• The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Literature, Advertising, Century

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

  J. G. Ballard

  Reality, Sprung Up, Fiction

  "Fictions of Every Kind" (1971)

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• No one had a better sense of luxury than Coco Chanel, She really had the spirit of the 20th Century.

  Diana Vreeland

  Luxury, Spirit, Century

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• The troubles of the 20th century are not unlike those of adolescence -- rapid growth beyond the ability of organizations to manage, uncontrollable emotion, and a desperate search for identity. Out of adolescence, however, comes maturity in which physical growth with all its attendant difficulties comes to an end, but in which growth continues in knowledge, in spirit, in community, and in love; it is to this that we look forward as a human race. This goal, once seen with our eyes, will draw our faltering feet toward it.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Eye, Maturity, Feet

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• The light may be fading on the 20th century, but the sun is still rising on America.

  William J. Clinton

  America, Light, Rising

  William J. Clinton (2000). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1999”, p.2353, Government Printing Office

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• I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Trying, Typical, World

  "Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich". Interview, March 1995.

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• Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century.

  Charles Krauthammer

  War, Korea, Choices

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.

  Guy Maddin

  Independent, America, Race

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Hell is out of fashion --institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. . .

  J. G. Ballard

  Fashion, Skulls, Dungeons

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