Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 15

• Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.

  Kenneth Waltz

  War, Acceptance, Earthquakes

  Kenneth N. Waltz (2010). “Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis”, p.1, Columbia University Press

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• The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

  Tim Wu

  Blessing, Information, Empires

  Tim Wu (2010). “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, p.160, Vintage

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• The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present. Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the twentieth century.

  Manolo Blahnik

  Missing, Important, Looks

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• This is what we've been waiting for: finally, an unprecedented critical analysis of the history of Dutch design. Mienke Simon Thomas's Dutch Design is a book to have and to read: an important and richly detailed study of the cultural, economical and social-political context of twentieth-century design in the Netherlands.

  Wim Crouwel

  Book, Critical Analysis, Design

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• Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Should Have, Mind, Century

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• Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.

  Rebecca L. Walkowitz

  Ambitious, Vivid, Fiction

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• Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, “Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!

  William Attwood

  Book, Artist, Dust

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• I think I was born with a sense of instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things my character has served me well it has made me. well, an eighteenth -century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.

  Wendy Lesser

  Character, Men, Thinking

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• It’s notable that the countries that most pride themselves on their commitment to equality, human rights, and democracy (like the United States and the western European countries) are precisely those that, in the late twentieth century, invented a new status (‘illegal’) in order to deprive some of their residents of access to equality, human rights, and democracy.I am honored to lend my name to PICUM’s campaign to end the use of the term ‘illegal’ and to challenge the whole concept of illegality as a status.

  Aviva Chomsky

  Country, Commitment, Pride

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• As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

  Stephen Bayley

  Art, Communication, Technology

  Stephen Bayley (2000). “General Knowledge”, Booth-Clibborn

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• Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society.

  Carl Bernstein

  Government, Safety, Levels

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• It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

  Michael Behe

  Fundamentals, Goes On, Natural

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• At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.

  Karen Armstrong

  Country, Intellectual, Looks

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

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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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• 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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• I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

  Penelope Wilton

  Century, Close Relationship

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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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• The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

  J. G. Ballard

  Stars, Energy, Orbit

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• Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

  Helen Vendler

  Literature, Glory, Modern

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• The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

  Alain Aspect

  Development, World, Mechanic

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• What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America.

  Frank Crowninshield

  America, France, Century

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• Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

  Jill Lepore

  Roots, Grass, Century

  "Wall Street Protests: Cash-Roots" by Jill Lepore, www.newyorker.com. October 6, 2011.

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• A word to the wise to all the children of the twentieth century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There's a wondrous magic to Christmas, and there's a special power reserved for little people. In short, there's nothing mightier than the meek, and a merry Christmas to each and all.

  Rod Serling

  Wise, Children, Merry Christmas

  "The Twilight Zone: The Night of the Meek". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 1960.

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• So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

  James W. Loewen

  White, Color, Europe

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.85, The New Press

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• We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

  William J. Brennan

  Mean, Justice, Principles

  "The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification" (speech),Washington, D.C., 12 Oct. 1985

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