Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 16

• 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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• I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Atheism, Hebrew, Accepting

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• As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.

  Robert A. Dahl

  Men, Tyrants, Democracy

  Robert A. Dahl (2015). “On Democracy”, p.13, Yale University Press

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• Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.

  Robertson Davies

  Beauty, Achievement, Today

  Robertson Davies (1952). “Tempest-tost”, Clarke Irwin

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• One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Truth, Believe, Peculiar

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Christopher Ralling (1967). “Muggeridge through the microphone: B.B.C. radio and television”, Not Avail

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• The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

  Gertrude Stein

  Science, Doe, Literature

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.66, Random House

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• History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight.

  Neil Armstrong

  Future, Space Flight, Technological Development

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• In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

  Laurie Garrett

  Age, Care, Disease

  Laurie Garrett (2003). “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health”, p.9

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• The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.

  Richard Heinberg

  Competition, Environmental, Energy

  Richard Heinberg (2003). “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”, New Society Pub

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• This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Hate, Fall

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• I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Believe, Civilization

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• It is my belief that whereas the twentieth century has been a century of war and untold suffering, the twenty-first century should be one of peace and dialogue. As the continued advances in information technology make our world a truly global village, I believe there will come a time when war and armed conflict will be considered an outdated and obsolete method of settling differences among nations and communities.

  Dalai Lama

  War, Believe, Technology

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• A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

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• The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

  Neil Postman

  Spiritual, Technology, Brain

  Neil Postman (2011). “The Disappearance of Childhood”, p.146, Vintage

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• In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

  Martin Amis

  Fashion, Thinking, Half

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

  John Lahr

  Spiritual, White, America

  "Hard Sell" by John Lahr, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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