Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 9

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

A. L. Rowse

Hate, Century, Filthy

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The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Russell Baker

Environmental, Society, Age

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When Congress gets through investigating Attorney General Janet Reno, will her agency become known as the Obstruction of Justice Department? The civil rights movement was one of the great moral crusades in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in more recent times it has become all too much like those it opposed, demanding racial double standards and even condoning verbal and violent attacks against members of other races.

Thomas Sowell

Agency, Rights, Race

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Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Emmet Gowin

Photography, Art, Butterfly

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The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revolution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.

Amadeo Bordiga

Running, Russia, Historical

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Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Greg Egan

Society, Use, Century

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The use of the word royalty, as fee to a proprietor for the exploitation of a work or property, derives from the period when the sovereign assumed title to all wealth of the realm. It was the struggle for freedom from these encroachments of the state that chiefly marked the Nineteenth Century, and established everywhere constitutional regimes of limited authority. In the Twentieth Century, however, we have witnessed a gradual and almost unrestricted movement back to state authoritarianism, primarily in the economic sphere, accompanied by the spread of state monopoly and intervention.

Elgin Groseclose

Struggle, Sovereign, Spheres

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The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

Men, Noble Man, Atrocities Committed

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In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Bible, Thinking, Vices

Daniel J. Boorstin (1962). “The Image or What Happened to the American Dream”

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The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

Aldo Leopold

Discovery, Land, Radio

Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.108, Oxford University Press

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One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends.

Caryl Rivers

Engineering, Political, Great Inventions

Caryl Rivers (1991). “More joy than rage: crossing generations with the new feminism”, Univ Pr of New England

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I was like one of those people who is allergic to the twentieth century... I'd been brought up to think there was some order to things, but there was no safety net. Doctors accused me of being mad.

Peter Wolf

Health, Thinking, Doctors

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The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.

James Joll

Independence, Example, Spirit

James Joll (1978). “Antonio Gramsci”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

George Steiner

Art, Skills, Degrees

George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Civilization, Humanity, Unity

Leopold Sedar Senghor (1965). “Prose and Poetry”

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The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

David Blankenhorn

Children, School, Men

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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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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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Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

Michael Pollan

Sweet, Wind, Apples

Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.44, Random House

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These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Miguel de Unamuno

Science, Technology, Alchemist

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Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in detail the most intimate aspects of personal life, while maintaining an almost prudish reserve concerning the political significance of family life.

Mary Ann Glendon

Political, Doubt, Details

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The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.

Eric Hoffer

Communism, Crime, Consideration

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In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

Juan Goytisolo

Drama, Criticism, Narrative

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Space exploration must be undertaken not only out of simple human curiosity but also to further the survival of the species. The twentieth century has seen the unprecedented development and proliferation of magnificent technologies. Many of them, through design, ignorance, or misuse, are capable of destroying life as well as enhancing it. Space exploration alone holds the promise of eventual escape from a dying planet, provided we wisely manage our resources in the meantime and actually survive that long.

Edgar Mitchell

Ignorance, Technology, Simple

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If two or three hundred years from now an earthbound civilization is dying ... and they look back at the opportunity that we have here at the close of the twentieth century to move out into space and they see that we didn't do anything with it ... I don't want history to judge us on having blown this opportunity, and I think history will judge us on this more than on any other issue.

Paul Levinson

Moving, Opportunity, Thinking

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