Century Quotes - Page 18

• What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

  Bertrand Piccard

  Inspire, Aviation, Should

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• The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil…. We [will] start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century.

  David Goodstein

  Running, Oil, Fuel

  David Goodstein (2005). “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

  Peter Drucker

  Cities, Organization, Community

  "Civilizing the City". Leader to Leader, No. 7, 1998.

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• The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Doubt, Machines

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• The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

  Germaine Greer

  Horse, Art, Men

  Germaine Greer (2001). “The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work”, p.105, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

  Boris Pasternak

  Sleep, Men, Thinking

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak. Paraphrase of the 1958 translation, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978), 1957.

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• The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Lonely, Stars, Lying

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (2001). “The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers”, p.564, Stanford University Press

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• There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

  William S. Burroughs

  Government, Law, Cities

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.416, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Running, Exhausted, Force

  John Maynard Keynes (1929). “The Economic Consequences of the Peace: The classic text on the Treaty of Versailles and post war Europe”, p.150, Harriman House Limited

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• You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

  Thomas Friedman

  Thinking, Government, Years

  "The Earth Is Full". www.nytimes.com. June 7, 2011.

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• What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

  Betty Friedan

  Motherhood, Years, Names

  "The Fountain of Age". Book by Betty Friedan, Preface, 1993.

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• Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  America, Track, Poetry

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2010). “We: Introduction by Will Self”, p.59, Random House

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• Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

  Barbara Tuchman

  War, Cost, Pay

  "A Distant Mirror". Book by Barbara Tuchman, p. 81, 1978.

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• The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Running, War, Poison

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.412, Random House

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• The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in the 19-th century). The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as the discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also to the Arabs who followed the calculations of the school ... The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest and that from which the Egyptians, Greek, Romans and - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge.

  Jean Sylvain Bailly

  Stars, School, Moon

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• To try to teach ignoring technology is to ignore the progress that we have made over the last century. If school is preparation for the real world - a real world that is increasingly technology-driven - then to ignore technology is to become obsolete.

  Adora Svitak

  Real, School, Technology

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• Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Construction Workers, Design

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• The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

  Martin Filler

  Technology, Men, Architecture

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• The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

  Alfred de Musset

  Past, Curiosity, World

  "Confession d'un Enfant du Siécle". Book by Alfred de Musset, 1836.

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• Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.

  Louis Pasteur

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

  Address at the "Sorbonne Scientific Soirée" on April 07, 1864. "The Life of Pasteur". Book by René Vallery-Radot, translated by R .L. Devonshire, p. 140, archive.org. 1902.

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• England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial... until about the middle of the last century, when a number of ingenious and inventive men, without apparent relation to each other, arose in various parts of the kingdom, succeeded in giving an immense impulse to all the branches of the national industry; the result of which has been a harvest of wealth and prosperity, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world.

  Samuel Smiles

  Men, Numbers, Giving

  "Lives of the Engineers". Book by Samuel Smiles, 1861.

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• Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition.

  Hugh Kingsmill

  Wind, Names, Leader

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• It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

  Alain de Botton

  Taken, Has Beens

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

  Alain de Botton

  Reality, Odds, Play

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.

  Laura Riding

  Writing, Mean, Practice

  "A Survey of Modernist Poetry". Book by Laura Riding, 1927.

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