Century Quotes - Page 15

• Meton (astronomer in 5th century BC): With the straight ruler I set to work To make the circle four-cornered .

  Aristophanes

  Work, Circles, Four

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• You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries.

  Garrett Fort

  Men, Murder, Five

  "Fictional character: Prof. Von Helsing". "Dracula's Daughter", 1936.

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• If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress-which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.

  Robert Wright

  Change, Strong, War

  Robert Wright (2001). “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny”, p.314, Vintage

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• The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

  Neil Postman

  Spiritual, Technology, Brain

  Neil Postman (2011). “The Disappearance of Childhood”, p.146, Vintage

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• Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

  Lillian Hellman

  Russia, Class, America

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• The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

  Lewis Mumford

  Moon, Men, Discipline

  Lewis Mumford (2016). “The Culture of Cities”, p.372, Open Road Media

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• No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Mother, Children, America

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Fashion, Art

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• In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

  Lynne Truss

  Home, People, Gone

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• It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

  Hannah Arendt

  Government, Opponents, Dramatic

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.206, Penguin

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• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

  John Lahr

  Spiritual, White, America

  "Hard Sell" by John Lahr, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• 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.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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• I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Book, Black History, Process

  "Patt Morrison Asks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - still hooked". articles.latimes.com. March 24, 2012.

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• Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

  Douglas Coupland

  Past, Ideas, Two

  Douglas Coupland (2008). “JPod”, p.12, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• The Government's mission is to build a strong and fair Australia capable of meeting the new challenges of the 21st century.

  Kevin Rudd

  Strong, Government, Australia

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

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• We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

  Ali Smith

  Character, Past, Rolling Along

  "Do we still need Doctor Who? Time travel in the internet age" by James Gleick, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2017.

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• I would love to do a period piece - in the 18th or 17th century. To me, it would be such an incredible challenge because of the way people carried themselves. There are so many incredible stories within those centuries - just the language and the way they carried themselves and what they were going through.

  Amy Smart

  People, Challenges, Way

  "Interview: Amy Smart" by Vicki Hogarth, www.askmen.com.

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• Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

  Amy Waldman

  Christian, Gay, Doctors

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• When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

  Jim Woodring

  Character, America, Ties

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. July 8, 2010.

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• I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

  Sanford I. Weill

  War, People, Challenges

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• Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art.

  John Walford

  Art, Sides, Failing

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• Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

  Abraham Kuyper

  Art, Soul, Age

  Abraham Kuyper (2007). “Lectures on Calvinism”, p.143, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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.

  Kenneth Scott Latourette

  India, Population, World

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• Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Long, Creative, Inability

  Lawrence Lessig “Free Culture”, Lulu.com

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