Century Quotes - Page 21

• 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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• As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Country, Recovery, Past

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• [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Simple, Self, Ambitious

  "Science in History". Book by John Desmond Bernal, Volume 2, 1954.

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• Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

  John Lahr

  Coward, Momentum, Exhilaration

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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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• On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).

  Gustave Courbet

  Funeral, Meditation, Criticism

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• They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Men, Hands, Perfect

  "The Journal of Eugene Delacroix : A Selection". Book edited by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p. 256, 1980.

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• We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Believe, Intelligent, Track

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.312, 1980.

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• Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Inspiration, Europe, Civilization

  "Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom" also known as "Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism" by Mikhail Bakunin, September 1867.

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• When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

  Rollo May

  Reading, Emotional, Profound

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Plato, Latin, Buddhism

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• Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Sarcasm, Emotional, Symphony

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• In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Men, Nuclear, Neutrons

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “V.”, p.187, Penguin

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• Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.

  James D. Watson

  Jobs, Moving, Heart

  James D. Watson (2001). “A Passion for DNA: Genes, Genomes, and Society”, p.229, OUP Oxford

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• It is through the multitudinous mass of living human hearts, of human acts and words of love and truth, that the Christ of the first century has become the Christ of the nineteenth.

  Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

  Heart, Firsts, Christ

  Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1872). “The National Thanksgiving: Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey: 1. Death and Life, December 10,1871; 2. The Trumpet of Patmos, December 17, 1871; 3. The Day of Thanksgiving, March 3, 1872”, p.15

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• Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Order, Done

  Harold Rosenberg (1983). “Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations”, p.138, University of Chicago Press

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• The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

  Michel Foucault

  Broken, Silence, Syntax

  Michel Foucault, Keith Hoeller, Ludwig Binswanger, Jacob Needleman (1984). “Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry”

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• The US has unthinkingly embarked upon a neoimperial policy that must involve us in virtually every great war of the coming century-and wars are the death of republics. If we continue on this course of reflexive interventions, enemies will one day answer our power with the weapon of the weak-terror, and eventually cataclysmic terrorism on US soil.

  Pat Buchanan

  War, Enemy, One Day

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• The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

  Irving Kristol

  Political, Events, Socialism

  "Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea". Book by Irving Kristol, September 20, 1995.

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• Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.

  Pope Paul VI

  Men, Jewels, Profound

  "Sacerdotalis Caelibatus". Encyclical of Pope Paul VI, w2.vatican.va. June 24, 1967.

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• Cobden was the greatest statesman and prophet of the century. His speeches are an inspiration. A man whose disciple I am willing to confess I am.

  Richard Cobden

  Inspiration, Men, Speech

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• I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st Century - still a great nation, but no longer the leader of the world...

  Mitt Romney

  America, Leader, World

  "Romney suspends White House bid". news.bbc.co.uk. February 8, 2008.

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• I find Chinese debates about their political system domestically, but also about China's claims in the international system, to be among the most original and surprising and exciting of our time. The starting point is a system that none of us had anticipated, which I call Leninist capitalism, but also obviously because it is the most important emerging power. The question of China's relations with the United States in particular, and the rest of the world in general, is the question of war and peace in the 21st century.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  War, Political, Chinese

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