20th Century Quotes - Page 19

• It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

  Lynne Truss

  Believe, Should Have, Track

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• A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.

  Abraham Flexner

  Medicine, Physicians, Chance

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• 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

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• It was a different social structure. I'd go to [David] Bailey's for dinner at 10:30. There were always girls there and a house full of . . . I don't know, anybody. Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper . . . And there I am sitting down with these creatures of the 20th century, and it was normal to us.

  Manolo Blahnik

  Girl, House, Sitting Down

  Interview with Tim Blanks, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 13, 2013.

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• The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

  Mary Schmich

  Phones, Cells, Skills

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• We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand.

  Eugen Drewermann

  Struggle, Hands, Talking

  Speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland, May 21, 1977.

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• I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

  Martin Scorsese

  New York, Italian, America

  "Martin Scorsese Defends 'The Wolf of Wall Street': 'The Devil Comes With a Smile' (Q&A)". Interview with Scott Feinberg, www.hollywoodreporter.com. December 31, 2013.

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• Much more than a 20th-century village storyteller, Cees Nooteboom stands as an impressive and inimitable voice among contemporary writers.

  Linda Simon

  Voice, Village, Century

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• For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

  Cynthia Daignault

  Photography, Differences, Space

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I first started to do fashion shows I didn't have the budget to hire top models so I would cast women who inspired me, and ask them to walk how they walked. I was doing a mise en scène, which for me was normal. I love for people to see my clothes, but it was more about the attitude of the girls. The revues of the late 19th century/early 20th century were very much a reflection of what was happening in society and politics, and for me that is also the role of the fashion designer.

  Jean Paul Gaultier

  Girl, Fashion, Attitude

  Source: wwd.com

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• In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.

  Linda Colley

  People, World, Littles

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• The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity.

  James Fallows

  Book, Ideas, Issues

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• I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Father, Thinking, Sprung Up

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• Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Inspiring, Country, Vocabulary

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• Not being able to address the attribution of change in the early 20th century to my mind precludes any highly confident attribution of change in the late 20th century.

  Judith Curry

  Mind, Addresses, Able

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• 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.

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• The sexual revolution produced cultural convulsions that were unparalleled in the 20th century.

  Volkmar Sigusch

  Revolution, Century, Sexual Revolution

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• A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Quality, Terrible, Evidence

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I think being from Iran sharpened my eye as an art dealer. This is why, today, I think the true definition of so-called postmodernism is the acceptance that we cannot go by old models any longer. The old models were based upon a single narrative of development that happened along a singular path. In the 20th century, you have electricity, you have transportation by plane, you have the telephone and all the various media that developed, you have a multiplicity of events and voices and creativities that are happening all around the world-and that multiplicity escalated after the war.

  Tony Shafrazi

  Art, War, Creativity

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it. I mean, if you're going to compare him to somebody, it's Shakespeare in terms of centrality of the tradition, in being at the beginning of it.

  Terry Teachout

  Mean, Important, Jazz

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Ironically, there is a history of black/Irish communion here in the states; Irish and African American brothers and sisters have often found common cause in fighting the bigotry both communities faced earlier in the 20th century. However, white skin privilege among the Irish separated them from blacks, who had no such advantage to fall back upon. The solution is to fight bigotry and racism wherever they appear, and to root out the forces of oppression as conscientiously as possible.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Brother, Fall, Fighting

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• The end of World War I also marked the end of bourgeois culture. An inner emptiness developed that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, paved the way for two ideologies that dragged Europe and the world into an abyss and plunged it into a catastrophe.

  Walter Kasper

  War, Two, Europe

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Angela Merkel embodies Germany's 20th century fate. It is not up to me to pass judgment on her place in history, but I believe that she is the chancellor of Germany's reconciliation with Europe. She stands for a Germany for whom globalization has been a success and which accepts its role in foreign and defense policy. I thought the way she dealt with the refugees was courageous. I think she is the chancellor of reconciliation.

  Emmanuel Macron

  Believe, Fate, Thinking

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• The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation.

  Robert McNamara

  Past, Goal, Balance

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• When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.

  DJ Spooky

  Art, Kids, Way

  "DJ Spooky’s Icy Philharmonic". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. October 17, 2011.

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