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Century Quotes

“Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.”

Thinking Made Ends Film Moral Century Directors Demand Treats Victim Excellence Mediums Propaganda 20th Century Spectators Manipulative

Author:Michael Haneke

“Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.”

People Home Happens Deals Common Century Huge Died Hospitals 20th Century Huge Changes

Author:Joan Didion

“The nerds provide the toys that distract the morons. So the nerds are sort of the new drug-dealers. We're the drug dealers of the 21st century because we provide all the brain candy for the mouth-breathers, for lack of a better word.”

Brain Century Drug Mouths Toys 21st Century Candy Nerd Dealer Moron Drug Dealers

Author:Chris Hardwick

“[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.”

“One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice.”

“The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.”

Men Age Faces Poor Results Wife Century Ready Bottom Greed Lust Innocence Making Love Employed Neighbour Grind Nineteenth Century Refrain Pinching Love Lust

Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley

Source: The collected works of Aldous Huxley

“It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.”

Years Lost Secret History Doubt Modern Century Perfection Remains Following Chemistry Mistress Inventor Cradle Modern Science Poisoning

Author:Honore de Balzac

“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”

Ifs Feels Art Enough Hands Love Is Century Mines Poet Holy Majors Supreme Idolatry Nineteenth Century Cromwell

Book:Three Plays for Puritans

Source: Three Plays for Puritans

“The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.”

Century Invention Revolutionary Artificial Nineteenth Century Sterilization

Book:Shaw, Plays by George Bernard

Source: Shaw, Plays by George Bernard

“Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.”

Thinking Men Life May Reality Life Is Mankind Century Terror Rage Cease Despite Thoughtful Desolation Uprooting

Book:The Major Works

Source: The Major Works

“We believe that there is one economic lesson which our twentieth century experience has demonstrated conclusively-that America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business.... the two are interdependent. You cannot strengthen one by weakening the other, and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the legs of a giant.”

“Hell is out of fashion --institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. . .”

Hell Century Fashion Rate Affair Bars Gaps 20th Century Skulls Dungeons Inferno Buchenwald

Author:J. G. Ballard

“You cannot gauge the intelligence of an American by talking with him; you must work with him. The American polishes and refines his way of doing things-even the most commonplace-the way the French of the 17th century polished their maxims.”

Way America Talking Century Maxims Polish Commonplace Polished Gauges 17th Century

Book:The Passionate State of Mind

Source: The Passionate State of Mind

“Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper lines, far down in the all but fathomless Atlantic; never before penetrated … save when some foundering vessel has plunged with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem … but a miracle … that the thoughts of living men … should burn over the cold, green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as warm as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them centuries ago?”

“In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today's shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.”

People Age Today Modern Middle Century Citizens Oil Technological Snakes Middle Ages 19th Century Ailments Cactus Antioxidants

Author:Charles Krauthammer

“In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.”

“Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions - they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate.”

World Wells Looks May Whole Seems House Fantasy Conditions Century Universal Climate Ghost Fancy Nerves Providing Domain Habitat

Author:Elizabeth Bowen

“For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.”

Source: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE - Complete 6 Volumes (Illustrated): Everything You Need to Know about the Biggest Victory of Women’s Rights and Equality in the United States – Written By the Greatest Social Activists, Abolitionists & Suffragists

“It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.”

Way Chance Fiction Novel Path Century Publish Nineteenth Century Naturalism Rams Treading Theodore Reticence Battering

Book:The Best Times: An Informal Memoir

Source: The Best Times: An Informal Memoir

“Out of all those centuries the Greeks can count seven sages at the most, and if anyone looks at them more closely I swear he'll not find so much as a half-wise man or even a third of a wise man among them.”

Ifs Men Looks Half Wise Century Thirds Seven Greek Swear Sage

Book:Literary and Educational Writings: Panegyricus and Philippum Austriaeducem. Moriae encomium. Dialogus Julius exclusus e coelis. Institutio principis christiani. Querela pacis

Source: Literary and Educational Writings: Panegyricus and Philippum Austriaeducem. Moriae encomium. Dialogus Julius exclusus e coelis. Institutio principis christiani. Querela pacis

“But I would emphasize again that social and economic solutions, as such, will not avail to satisfy the aspirations of the people unless they conform with the traditions of our race, deeply grooved in their sentiments through a century and a half of struggle for ideals of life that are rooted in religion and fed from purely spiritual springs.”

People Spiritual Social Race Half Struggle Economic Century Spring Solutions Ideals Tradition Aspiration Feds Sentiments Rooted Conform

Book:Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President

Source: Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President

“When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.”

Men Firsts Different Land Century Battle British Instance Administration Defeated 20th Century Revolt Different Place

Author:Chinua Achebe

“The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.”

Men Writing Said Water Common Air Sea Century Rivers Fishes Boat Lakes Fishing Ads Seashore Flowing Water Justinian

Book:The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat

Source: The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat

“Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.”

Should Humans Greater Century Expression Broken Activity Slavery Barriers Artificial Womens Rights Submission Crave Assertion Truest Emancipation

Book:Emma Goldman

Source: Emma Goldman

“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”

Source: Karl Marx: Selected Writings

“With a full century of contrary proof in our possession and despite our demonstrated capacity for cooperative teamwork, some among us seem to accept the shibboleth of an unbridgeable gap between those who hire and those who are employed. We miserably fail to challenge the lie that what is good for management is necessarily bad for labor; that for one side to profit, the other must be depressed. Such distorted doctrine is false and foreign to the American scene where common ideals and purpose permit us a common approach toward the common good.”

“The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple...the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.”

Simple Modern Century Design Building Pure Office Machines Tall Engines Motor Office Buildings

Author:Frank Lloyd Wright

“What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.”

Book:The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

Source: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

“... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.”

Different Real Matter Use Reality Life Is Century Strange Realistic Being Real Realism Earnest Twentieth Century Here And Now No Point

Book:Wars I have seen

Source: Wars I have seen

“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”

Nature Century Events Phenomenon Splendid Twentieth Century

Author:Gertrude Stein

“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”

Men Young Dies Reading Literature Century Willing Independence Young Man Tension Relaxed Nineteenth Century Manchester Poland Puritan Voluptuous Willing To Die

Book:The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews

Source: The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews

“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”

Kind Young Universe Grief Grace Cutting Century Tears Please Species Novelists Silver Minors Smooth Widows Suggesting Sentimentality Placid Acacia

Book:The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West

Source: The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Source: The Red and the Black: World Classics

“It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.”

Faces Rooms Wife Doors Century Husband Blow Revenge Drawing Contempt Nineteenth Century

Book:The Red and the Black

Source: The Red and the Black

“But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”

Age Levels Half Century Information Changed Ignorance Perception Shock Entering Familiarity Numb Insensitive Information Age Cumulative

Author:Anna Quindlen

“I have started to say "A quarter of a century" Or "thirty years back" About my own life.”

Years My Own Century Aging Thirty Quarters My Own Life Thirty Years Quarter Of A Century

Author:Philip Larkin

“From a long view of the history of mankind the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”

Long Law Views Mankind Century Events Discovery Significant Judged Nineteenth Century Insignificance Maxwell Significant Events

Book:The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter

Source: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter

“The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.”

Source: Keeping a Rendezvous

“There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.”

Writing Country Values Three Century Ignorance Ancient Traditional Native Speakers Native American American Values

Book:WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

Source: WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

“Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.”

Source: Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897

“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”

Lasts Fantasy Century Disease Understood Medicine Response Inspired Cancer Eras Premises Capricious Tuberculosis

Book:Illness as metaphor

Source: Illness as metaphor

“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”

Matter Problem Age Culture Answers Modern Century Mass Camps Elites Detachment Nineteenth Century Prerogative Surrogates Dandy Mass Culture Dandyism

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

Source: A Susan Sontag reader

“Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.”

Children Has Beens Play Culture Century Adults Producers Consumers Transformed Toys 21st Century

Author:David Elkind

“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.”

“The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters and making up the public's mind.”

Mind Language Century Stage Criticism Letters Setting Settings Making Up Literary Criticism

Author:Fannie Hurst

“If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.”

“The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.”

Needs Believe Doe Art Made Matter Age I Believe Society Share Century Personality Scientist Aim Dresses Painter Liberation Motive Our Society Trends Navigation

Book:The Common Sense of Science

Source: The Common Sense of Science

“The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.”

World Children Done Facts Home Mother Father Progress Century 20th Century Retard

Author:Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.”

Way Writing Hard Lasts Literature Century Duty Sacred Journalism Extras Cherish Reviews Diamond Crowns Sparkling

Author:Florence King

“Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to "bring us together.”

Source: Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye