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20th Century Quotes

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20th Century Quotes

“Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all—the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.”

EuropeLiesFascismColonialism20th CenturyImperialismSpainNazismBritish EmpireStalinismGeorge OrwellIntellectual LifeCataloniaSpanish Civil War
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all—every one of us—take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.”

PhilosophyHumanity20th Century
Book:Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations
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“The 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s were a time of rising nationalism coupled with technology-driven angst and revulsion at governments that appeared to be both corrupt and relics of an earlier age. The widespread questioning and tottering of faith caused prospective Fascist leaders to test their training wheels and spurred movements and fads of every description, from mysticism and belief in fairies to flagpole-sitting and a flirtation across the political spectrum with eugenics and its accompanying racial theories. Mussolini’s early success energized those whose primary fear was Bolshevism or what they imagined to be Bolshevism: loud demands for higher wages, for example, or campaigns for land reform. In virtually every country, there were veterans who—regardless of which side they had fought on during the war—were contemptuous of civilian politicians. Anti-Semitism, whether casual or visceral, flourished in politics, the professions, academia, and the arts. The bewildering rush of globalization prompted many to find solace in the familiar rhythms of nation, culture, and faith; and people everywhere seemed to be on the lookout for leaders who claimed to have simple and satisfying answers to modernity’s tangled questions.”

GovernmentChangeSimplicityComplexityNationalismFascism20th CenturyAntisemitismBolshevismBenito Mussolini
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life. ("New York Blues")”

Alone20th Century
Book:Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
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“Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.”

LifeInspirationalWritingWarPhilosophyWisdomMotivationalScienceQuotesPeaceMoneyKnowledgeTechnologyPowerConversationSpeechWeaponsTraditionMachinesMeetingsTraditionalMovieStoryPeace Of MindMoralsRhetoricUrban20th CenturyNew AgeCreative WritingAmit KalantriAmit Kalantri QuotesPublic SpeakingProverbsMissilesSocial NetworkingBloggingCharactersAmit Kalantri WriterAdageNovel WritingBook WritingEssayScriptAdvertisementBlogModern TimesMovie DialogueScript WritingCatchphrasesAlliterationsTag LinesScriptwritingCatch LinesSpeechwritingPunchlineMachineInventionsManpowerWorld WarSimplicity In LifeComplicated LifeOld TimesPresent TimesMissileOld Is Gold
Book:Wealth of Words
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“Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.”

FreedomUnited StatesTelevisionRussiaJournalismCommunismLiberationPropagandaDictatorshipColonialismCold War20th CenturySoviet UnionSpainGreeceDespotismMoscowZimbabweCzechoslovakiaMao ZedongPostcolonialismRonald ReaganMilos Forman
Book:Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
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“This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.”

PhilosophyNovelPsychologyNarcissism20th CenturyCzechExistentialist
Author:Milan Kundera
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“It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.”

LibertyLibertarianSocialismCommunismGenocideHolocaustSocialist20th CenturyEthnic CleansingMass MurderCommunistsGenocidalHolomodorInternational Socialism
Author:A.E. Samaan
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“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

FaithHolocaust20th Century
Book:Night
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“Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.”

IgnoranceCivilization21st Century20th CenturyVulgarTwentieth CenturyBarbarismVulgarityBarbaricBarbarianIconoclastVandal
Author:Peter Sloterdijk
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“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”

LifeDeathMurderAbortion20th Century1960sGunsLaw And OrderConservativesLiberals
Book:These Truths: A History of the United States
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“Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”

AmericaDemocracyFutureEuropePatriotismNationalism20th CenturyPatriotsNationalists
Book:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.”

Fascism20th CenturyVienna
Book:The World of Yesterday
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“It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it. Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores. All in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work, for wages. The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the fortunes of these capitalists. To heap, and heap again, and yet again. And that, in spite of the fact that they and everyone about them lived in unthinkable luxury. And was it not plain that if the people cut off the share of those who merely owned, the share of those who worked would be much greater? That was as plain as two and two makes four, and that was the whole of it. Absolutely, the whole of it. And yet, there were people who could not see it. Who would argue about everything else in the world. They would tell you that governments could not mange things as economically as private individuals. They would repeat and repeat that and think they were saying something. They could not see that economical management by masters, meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder, and ground closer, and paid less. They were wage owners and servants at the mercy of exploiters, whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible.”

HistoryCapitalismSocial JusticeSocialism20th CenturyAmericanImmigrant ExperienceThe JungleMuckraking
Book:The Jungle
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“Whereas the pagans of yore groped after mystery in all the strange beauty of the world, the pagans of the 20th century, having supplanted nature with factories, saw the glimmer of the transcendental only in themselves. Hence, their longing for mystery—union in one sacred body, absolute order, and submission to an omnipotent lord—was manifested in an obscene eidolon palpable, for instance, in the Nazi motto, 'ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”

LordMysteryNazi20th CenturyMottoTranscendentalPagans
Author:Michael Shindler
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“We are entering a period of intense cadaverousness and our imaginations are simply not up to it. Here too we must choose and make our own personal obituaries. Is this a foretaste of the end of the century? Everything today - the launching of a newspaper, a ship, a commercially ruinous aircraft, a road network, a new missile or a cultural programme - is justified in the last instance by the fact that it creates jobs. This argument, which is itself devoid of meaning, is our alibi, our last rites, our Extreme Unction.”

20th CenturyLack Of PurposeTrabalhismoLack Of Imagination
Book:Cool memories
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“In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

ScienceBeliefAbsurdity20th CenturyMacroScaleAnthropocentrismMicro
Book:Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
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“When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself without an owner, it looked so lonely, it looked so empty. Something made me pick it up arid take it in to her. Like when someone's going away, you help them on with their coat, or their jackboots, or whatever it is they need for going away. I didn't try to put it back on her, I just set it down there beside her close at hand. You're going to need this, I said to her in my mind. You're starting on a long walk. You're going to keep walking from now on, looking for your home. I stopped and wondered for a minute if that was what happened to all of us when we crossed over. Just keep walking, keep on walking, with no ahead and no in-back-of; tramps, vagrants in eternity. With our last hope and horizon - death - already taken away. In the Middle Ages they had lurid colors, a bright red hell, an azure heaven shot with gold stars. They knew where they were, at least. They could tell the difference. We, in the Twentieth, we just have the long walk, the long walk through the wispy backward-stringing mists of eternity, from nowhere to nowhere, never getting there, until you're so tired you almost wish you were alive again. ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" - first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)”

DeathHeavenDyingAfterlife20th CenturyTwentieth CenturyAfter DeathLimboAfter Life
Author:Cornell Woolrich
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“I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.”

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Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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