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

  47 Copy quote

• 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".

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Business, Journey

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  42 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  73 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  William Lyon Phelps

  Life, Spiritual, Disease

  5 Copy quote

• 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)

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• The way he's swinging the bat, he won't get a hit until the 20th century.

  Jerry Coleman

  Funny, Baseball, Humor

  0 Copy quote

• Well, the first thing I had to do was to read a lot. First of all, about education... and looking at education from the Middle Ages right through to the 20th Century. The second major area was country life in the 19th Century, which I don't know much about these days.

  Michael Haneke

  Country, Age, Firsts

  Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is amazing how many of the horrors of the 20th century were a result of charismatic quacks misleading millions of people to their own doom. What is even more amazing is that, after a century that saw the likes of Hitler, Lenin and Mao, we still see no need to distrust charisma as a basis for choosing leaders, either in politics or in numerous organizations and movements.

  Thomas Sowell

  Organization, People, Leader

  Thomas Sowell (2002). “Controversial Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

  Max Nordau

  Flying, Generations, Machines

  11 Copy quote

• In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

  Ian Mcewan

  Art, Civilization, Holocaust

  5 Copy quote

• By far the most dangerous people in the world are optimists (those who believe that all can be made well here below). If you think all can be made well in this world, then you will go to any extreme to make it happen. There is the story of the 20th century. As Lenin said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs".

  Robert Barron

  Believe, Thinking, Eggs

  21 Copy quote