Century Quotes - Page 39

• India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.

  Arundhati Roy

  Night, Light, Digital Revolution

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• [T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Pain, Emotion, Insensitivity

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• Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.

  Lawrence M. Friedman

  Sex, Children, Writing

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• Education has a tremendous power on man. Can't we see to which astonishing disciple the people of Sparte have submitted ("s'est plié", Fr.) for centuries, and this with a view to very petty purposes: purely outer greatness, the military predominace of Sparte. This example proves that man can everything on themselves when they want it ("peuvent tout sur eux-mêmes quand ils le veulent", Fr.); therefore it would only be a question of making them will the good.

  African Spir

  Military, Greatness, Men

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 58), 1937.

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• movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion.

  Jennifer Stone

  Movie, Taken, Mood

  Jennifer Stone (1988). “Mind Over Media: Essays on Film and Television”

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• I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

  Bill Nye

  Meaningful, Thinking, Years

  Bill Nye (2014). “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation”, p.39, St. Martin's Press

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• I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.

  Tim Gunn

  Fashion, Teaching, Discipline

  "In Which Tim Gunn Tells Men to Watch 'Project Runway'" by Kurt Soller, www.esquire.com. July 26, 2011.

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• Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mind, Age, Illusion

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.160, Harvard University Press

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• Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

  Bill Vaughan

  Fashion, Book, Years

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• The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book.

  Alec-Tweedie

  Money, Powerful, Book

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• whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens.

  Inez Haynes Irwin

  Taken, California, San Francisco

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• In this twenty-first century, there's no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you'll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.

  John Felstiner

  Real, Mean, Writing

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• Of course, if there should be war, it wouldn't last long - not in the twentieth century; and no one wants it. There would be, perhaps, a few skirmishes on the frontiers, and then everything would be arranged diplomatically.

  Marie Van Vorst

  War, Long, Would Be

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• Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble-one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

  Lester R. Brown

  Aquifers, Land, Civilization

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• Climate change poses a direct threat to the infrastructure of America that we need to stay competitive in this 21st-century economy.

  Barack Obama

  America, Politics, Climate

  Remarks by the President at Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience Meeting, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. July 16, 2014.

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• Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains: and this constant emigration, which, in the space of two centuries, might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa.

  Edward Gibbon

  Country, Army, Space

  Edward Gibbon (1870). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.119

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• But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.

  Bruce Sterling

  Dope, Government, Long

  "So, people, we have a fight on our hands" by Bruce Sterling, www.wired.com. July 1, 1994.

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• I use throughout the term 'liberal' in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that 'liberal' has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Country, Believe, Mean

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• Occasionally, in each age and in different lands, a Buddha is born, that is to say, an enlightened person...they re-codify the ways, the practices, they make changes that are just intelligent changes that adapt to a new century, a new culture.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Intelligent, Land

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• The 21st century is the century of knowledge. Knowledge, science and education will have the power and strength to embrace the entire universe.

  Narendra Modi

  Education, India, Embrace

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• If the 21st Century is the era of knowledge and of knowledgeable human-force, then, to extol this force, Gujarat must form a strong bond with books.

  Narendra Modi

  Strong, Book, Empowerment

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• The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.

  Joan M. Drury

  Writing, Reaching, Dilemma

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• If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.

  Takeshi Kaneshiro

  Memories, Lasts, Ifs

  "Fictional character: He Zhiwu, Cop 223". "Chungking Express", www.imdb.com. 1994.

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• Ah yes! Conservatives. Some of the finest minds of the 12th Century.

  Paul Begala

  Mind, Finest

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• The speeding toy cars produce in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st-century city.

  Chris Burden

  Stress, Cities, Car

  "Metropolis II: A Kinetic Sculpture That Circulates 100,000 Miniature Cars Every Hour", www.thisiscolossal.com. March 3, 2014.

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