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

  50 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".

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• No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.

  Walter Lippmann

  Average, Sea, Way

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• [During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.

  Rudolph Rummel

  Children, Men, Liberty

  5 Copy quote

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

  William Lyon Phelps

  Life, Spiritual, Disease

  6 Copy quote

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

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Business, Journey

  16 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.

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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

  18 Copy quote

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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

  77 Copy quote

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• With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century

  Winston Churchill

  Eras, Century, Ends

  Winston Churchill (1953). “Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952. Edited by Randolph S. Churchill”

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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.

  48 Copy quote

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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

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  5 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.

  27 Copy quote

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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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• 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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• 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

  65 Copy quote

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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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• The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Drama, Century, Has Beens

  "Great Performances (Leonard Bernstein: The Gift of Music)". TV Series, December 29, 1993.

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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

  9 Copy quote

• If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Way, Century, Ingenuity

  25 Copy quote

• Distraction is the most corrosive disease of the 20th century.

  James Victore

  Disease, Distraction, Century

  4 Copy quote