Century Quotes - Page 31

• At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Past, History, Perfect

  Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.7, Cambridge University Press

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• Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Hero, Successful, Reign

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• Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!

  Charles de Gaulle

  War, Greatness, France

  Charles de Gaulle (1960). “War Memoirs: Salvation, 1944-1946. Translated from the French by R. Howard”

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• Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Office, Age, Genius

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1846). “Mosses from an Old Manse...: In Two Parts”, p.18

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• If I could only live another century!

  Susan B. Anthony

  Life, If I Could, Ifs

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• The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Doors, World, Steps

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1871). “My Wife and I: Or, Harry Henderson's History”, p.74

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• To build a twenty-first-century economy, America must revive a nineteenth-century habit--investing in the common, national economic resources that enable every person and every firm to create wealth and value.

  William J. Clinton

  America, Firsts, Twenties

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• This is the century of fear.

  Albert Camus

  Fear

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• Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Hurt, Moving, Party

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• Latin America is very fond of the word "hope." We like to be called the "continent of hope." Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves "candidates of hope." This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century.

  Pablo Neruda

  Latin, Years, America

  Pablo Neruda (1977). “Memoirs”

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• Every thing, even the so-called timesaving device and energy-efficient machine, comes these days with an elaborate set of instructions for its care and feeding. Buying a machine has become more and more like buying a pet. ... We are time-crunched. Not just by the number of things we have to do, but the number of things we have. In the late twentieth century, things have become our new dependents.

  Ellen Goodman

  Numbers, Pet, Energy

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• Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

  Judith Martin

  Etiquette

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• the New Englander landed on a stony, barren tract, and a large share of his strength during two centuries has gone to force a living out of it. Hence he has come to regard economy - a necessary unpleasant quality at best - as the chief of virtues. He has cultivated habits which verge on closeness in dealing with food, and with the expression of feeling, and even - his enemies think - with feeling itself.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  Thinking, Expression, Two

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• After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

  Germaine Greer

  Women, Female, Remember

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• What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

  Boris Pasternak

  Writing, Symphony, People

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• The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

  Margaret Mead

  Cities, Childhood, Adults

  MARGARET MEAD (1930). “GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA”

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• We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women.

  Margaret Mead

  Opportunity, Mind, May

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• But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

  Jane Austen

  England, Gothic, Novel

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• The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

  Agnes Repplier

  Book, Giving, Principles

  Agnes Repplier (1908). “A Happy Half-century: And Other Essays”

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• No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

  Agnes Repplier

  Cities, Community, Quality

  Agnes Repplier (2009). “American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier”, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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• For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

  Agnes Repplier

  Thinking, Shifting, Comedy

  Agnes Repplier (1898). “Varia”

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• Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her.

  George Meredith

  Book, Becoming, Diaries

  George Meredith (1897). “Diana of the Crossways: A Novel”, p.51, Wayne State University Press

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• The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.

  Norman Mailer

  Stars, War, Men

  Norman Mailer (1970). “Of A Fire On The Moon”

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• The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.

  Susan Ertz

  Luck, Eras, Novelists

  Susan Ertz (1943). “Anger in the Sky: A Novel”

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• ... in the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers.

  Madame de Stael

  Profound, Mind, Admirer

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