Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 6

• Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day.

  Malcolm X

  Religious, Uncles, Kings

  Source: teachingamericanhistory.org

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• There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Years, Law

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

  Noam Chomsky

  School, Virginia, Law

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

  Raoul Peck

  Class, Identity, World

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

  Bill Ayers

  Simple, People, Black

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Interesting, Expectations

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• Never mind that from the 1600s until the late twentieth century the population the United States was 85% white, 12% black, and there have been changes demographically in the United States since the days of its founding. So they're trying to tell you that the United States' greatness happened because of diversity. Well, go back and look at the days the country was founded, and they do. When they do that, they see how racist and bigoted this country was. they see the seeds for bigotry and racism and discrimination were sown at the founding, is how it's now taught.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Country, Greatness, White

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious.

  Khaled Hosseini

  War, People, Peaceful

  Interview with Razeshta Sethna, newslinemagazine.com. November, 2003.

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• In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.

  Allen W. Wood

  Simple, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Important, Eras

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.

  Sam Hamill

  School, Law, Dynasty

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy.

  Vandana Shiva

  Believe, People, Political

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• No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.

  Charles R. Morris

  Technology, Mindset, Instinct

  Interview with Bob Morris, bobmorris.biz. December 17, 2012.

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• According to the management expert Peter F. Drucker, the term "entrepreneur" (from the French, meaning "one who takes into hand") was introduced two centuries ago by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to characterize a special economic actor-not someone who simply opens a business, but someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield." The twentieth-century growth economist Joseph A. Schumpeter characterized the entrepreneur as the source of the "creative destruction" necessary for major economic advances.

  David Bornstein

  Hands, Two, Yield

  David Bornstein (2004). “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Thinking, Humanity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• The reason Ataturk, Kemal Ataturk was and is so highly reputed, is he was attempting to modernize… That’s not the right word. Well, it is. For lack of a better way of saying it, he was trying to make Islam compatible with the modern twentieth century world.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Islam, Trying, Ataturk

  "Scrambling Liberals Don’t Know Who to Blame for the Istanbul Airport Attack". "The Rush Limbaugh Show", www.rushlimbaugh.com. June 29, 2016.

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• In the early period of Left struggles, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were many different trajectories for the struggle, whether you call it 'syndicalism' or 'anarchism' or, at the time, 'social democracy', eventually 'Communism', these were different theories of struggle. But all of them shared a basic understanding that the people...experience exploitation, they experience oppression, but they're not prepared to rise up.

  Vijay Prashad

  Struggle, People, Understanding

  "'Exiles From the Future': An Interview with Vijay Prashad". Interview with Andrew Stewart, www.counterpunch.org. August 17, 2016.

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• The prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century was both a cause and an effect of social and scientific breakthroughs that have redefined human life. The biggest change is simply that people live longer and have far more freedom to think about things other than staying alive.

  David Bornstein

  Freedom, Thinking, People

  David Bornstein (2004). “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas”, p.6, Oxford University Press, USA

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• A woman was the property of her father or her husband and that remained true right into the twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that women had a guaranteed right to serve on federal juries.

  Noam Chomsky

  Husband, Father, Century

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

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• Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Men, Identity Politics

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  War, Reality, Differences

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• Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

  Michael Mandelbaum

  Normal, Kind, Natural

  Michael Mandelbaum (2009). “The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century”, p.9, PublicAffairs

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• If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.

  Thomas Huxley

  Mean, Men, Injustice

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• The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.

  Philippe Aries

  Strength, Music, Hero

  Philippe Ariès (1962). “Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life”, Vintage

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• Patronizing the Arts is a brilliantly nuanced assessment of why universities must become art patrons. Learning from the twentieth-century university's embrace of Big Science, Garber argues that twenty-first-century universities must rigorously devote their attention to Big Art. Provocative, witty, and layered, Patronizing the Arts cogently demonstrates the advantages for both art and the university in this new and radical alliance.

  Peggy Phelan

  Witty, Art, Assessment

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