Century Quotes - Page 20

• The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Years, Two, Different

  Andrew Dickson White (2012). “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods”, p.40, Transaction Publishers

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• America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. And we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words, within our borders and around the world. We are shaped by every culture. Drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.

  Barack Obama

  Simple, Self, Blood

  A New Beginning: Speech at Cairo University, delivered 4 June 2009, Cairo, Egypt

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• Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

  Pauline Kael

  Art, Museums, Clown

  Pauline Kael (2011). “5001 Nights at the Movies”, p.511, Macmillan

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• For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Lonely, Teaching, Taken

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• Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.

  Georg Brandes

  Race, Effort, Trying

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.14, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• The belief that happiness has to be deserved has led to centuries of pain, guilt, and deception. So firmly have we clung to this single, illusory belief that we've almost forgotten the real truth about happiness. So busy are we trying to deserve happiness that we no longer have much time for ideas such as: Happiness is natural, happiness is a birthright, happiness is free, happiness is a choice, happiness is within, and happiness is being. The moment you believe that happiness has to be deserved, you must toil forevermore.

  Robert Holden

  Pain, Real, Believe

  Robert Holden (2011). “Happiness Now!: Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast”, p.100, Hay House, Inc

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• There can be no place in a 21st-century parliament for people with 15th-century titles upholding 19th-century prejudices.

  Paddy Ashdown

  People, Titles, Prejudice

  Independent, November 25, 1998.

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• Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Long, Vision, Drs

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.57, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

  Marcel Proust

  Novelists, Proust, Twentieth Century

  Marcel Proust (1999). “The captive & the fugitive”

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• In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked.:; In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.

  George Orwell

  Country, War, America

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

  Georges Braque

  Art, Mistake, Taken

  Article by John Richardson, December 01, 1957.

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• I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole.

  Frank Zappa

  Thinking, Civilization, Cynical

  "The Dub Room Special". 1982.

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• Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Spiritual, Practice, Understanding

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Carl Klagge, Alfred Nordmann (1993). “Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951”, p.131, Hackett Publishing

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• In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

  Brendan Gill

  Water, Gods And Goddesses, Shapes

  1982 Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.

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• The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Numbers, Ignorant

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

  Fred Hoyle

  Stars, Achievement, Scales

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Unique, Fleeting, Shapes

  Nixon, Richard M. (1971). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969”, p.1, Best Books on

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• I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Morning, War, Insane

  Muriel Rukeyser, Kate Daniels (1992). “Out of silence: selected poems”, Triquarterly Books

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• Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission--it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Writing, America, Twenties

  Fareed Zakaria (2009). “The Post-American World: And The Rise Of The Rest”, p.68, Penguin UK

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• In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Years, Enhancement, Towns

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.96, Penguin

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• My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions.

  Fritjof Capra

  Views, Ideas, Our World

  "The Turning Point". Book by Fritjof Capra, www.juwing.sp.ru. 1982.

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• There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Reality, Civilization

  Helmut Friedel, Tina Dickey, Hans Hofmann, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München (1998). “Hans Hofmann: Wunder Des Rhythmus und Schönheit Des Raumes : [exhibition at the Städtische Galerie Im Lenbachaus in Munich, from 23 April to 29 June 1997, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, from 12 September to 2 November 1997 ]”, p.97, Hudson Hills

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• In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

  Theodor Adorno

  Dream, Vegetables, Outcomes

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

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• The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

  Northrop Frye

  Intelligent, Men, People

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham (2004). “Northrop Frye unbuttoned: wit and wisdom from the notebooks and diaries”, Gnomon Distribution

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