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Century Quotes

“We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.”

Source: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It's a problem that we will not be able to solve in the next few years, and it's likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”

“The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.”

Men Children Suffering Hate Three Evil Millions Mankind Century Hundred Decades Gentle Portions Twentieth Century Men Women Monstrous Dove Stalin And Hitler

Book:Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

Source: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

“Newt Gingrich wants to repeal child labor laws. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man that we need to lead us into the 18th century.”

Men Want Needs Children Law Century He Man Labor Gentleman 18th Century Ladies And Gentlemen Newts Child Labor Labor Laws

Author:David Letterman

“Too often critics seem more intent on seeking new ways to alter Congress than to truly learn how it functions. They might well profit from the advice of Thomas Huxley, who said a century ago: Sit down before facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notionor you shall learn nothing.”

Way Giving Wells Children Littles Said Facts Seems Might Advice Century Giving Up Function Prepared Critics Congress Profit Seeking New Ways Be Prepared Huxley Preconceived Notions

Book:Selected speeches

Source: Selected speeches

“Literacy is much more than an educational priority - it is the ultimate investment in the future and the first step towards all the new forms of literacy required in the twenty-first century. We wish to see a century where every child is able to read and to use this skill to gain autonomy.”

“No one sane would let a first-century dentist fill their children's teeth. Why then do we allow first-century theologians to fill our children's minds?”

Mind Firsts Children Century Our Children Teeth Sane Theologian Dentist

Author:Michael Dowd

“Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.”

“I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world.”

World Children Fighting Sides Born Century Proud Satisfied New World Twentieth Century Never Regret

Author:Naz?m Hikmet

“Just as women needed the help of the law to enter the workplace in the 20th century, men will need the help of the law to love their children in the 21st century.”

Men Needs Children Helping Law Century Needed 21st Century Workplace 20th Century

Author:Warren Farrell

“We're going to build the bridge to the 21st century, we have to make our children free - free of the vise grip of guns and gangs and drugs; free to build lives of hope.”

Children Century Drug Gun Our Children Bridges 21st Century Gang Drug Free

Author:William J. Clinton

“The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.”

“The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth.”

Ifs Men Giving May Children Ends Earth Christian Lasts Universe Stars Grows Century Regard Our Children Tired Ships Worms Jumping Adventurous Harbour Jumping Off

Author:Robert Wilson Lynd

“Time for a new business model for the 21st century. For starters, retire that outdated and creepy clown. You can be a true leader by stop exploiting children. I guarantee the millennials market you’re after will reward you for it. I know the public health world will applaud you, starting with myself.”

“When you have schools that are operating in the 20th century, and we're trying to prepare our children for the 21st century, even those children know they are not educated in the right way.”

Knows Way Trying Children School Century Our Children Educated 21st Century Right Way 20th Century

Author:Donna Edwards

“Tony Blair a couple years ago was going around apologizing for everything. He apologized for the Irish potato famine. The Canadian government apologized for how it treated Indian school children.When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding-supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery?”

“A lawyer is sometimes required to search titles, and the client who thinks he has good right to an estate, puts the papers in his hands, and the attorney goes into the public records and finds everything right for three or four years back; but after a time he comes to a break in the title. So he finds that the man who supposed he owned it owns not an acre of the ground which belongs to someone else. I trace the title of this world from century to century until I find the whole right vested in God. Now to whom did he give it? To his own children. All are yours.”

Thinking Men World Giving Years Children Sometimes Whole Hands Three Break Records Four Century This World He Man Paper Lawyer Titles Four Years Clients Estates Papers Attorney Acres

Author:Thomas De Witt Talmage

“It didn't take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love.”

Want Children Dies Century Figures Experiments Infant Children Love

Book:Lost Children: Separation and Loss Between Children and Parents

Source: Lost Children: Separation and Loss Between Children and Parents

“People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.”

People Children Has Beens Century Marrying

Book:The decline and fall of science

Source: The decline and fall of science

“I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.”

Children War Done Age Lying Views Century Weight Ancient Credit Civil War Twelve Veteran War Veteran

Author:Flannery O'Connor

“Throughout the last century there were multiple attempts at giving Afghan women more autonomy, to change marriage laws, to abolish the practice of bride price and child marriage, and to enforce women to be involved in school. Every time, the reaction from the traditionalists was one of contempt and scorn and at times outright rebellion. I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.”

Thinking Giving Children School Lasts Law Practice Century Involved Reactions Rebellion Contempt Afghanistan Multiple Autonomy Scorn Brides Emancipation Abolish Afghan

Author:Khaled Hosseini

“Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.”

Writing Children Has Beens Ideas Moments Age Today Sex Cases Middle Subjects Century Speech Adults Wide Range Contracts Freedom Of Speech Scope Twentieth Century Banned Obscene Kinky

Author:Lawrence M. Friedman

“I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.”

Writing Children Littles Book Lasts House Fantasy Century Green Series West Favourite Pioneers 19th Century Runaway Laura Wilder Green Gables American West Favourite Book

Author:Tracy Chevalier

“Centuries ago it may have been difficult for pregnant women and their children to get proper nourishment, probably leading to smaller - and therefore shorter-lived - adults.”

May Children Has Beens Difficult Century Adults Pregnant Nourishment Pregnant Women

Author:Robert Fogel

“It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.”

“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.”

“For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power....When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion.”

“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.”

“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

“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 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

“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”

“Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem.... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women.”

Children Persons Ideas Problem Today Mother Individual Women Work Careers Century Conflict Guilt Currents Defined Men Women Being A Woman Nineteenth Century Being A Mother Malaise

Author:Sandra Scarr

“Mothers have not always had the most important role in their children's upbringing, when they had other economic roles to play. Inpast centuries, fathers were the key parent in the upbringing of the next generation, because moral training, not emotional sensitivity, was thought to be central to successful child-rearing. Mothers were thought to corrupt their little ones with too much affection and not enough stern training.”

“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.”

“Posterity--the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism--grows ever harder to conceive.”

Children Grows Century Optimism Harder Posterity Nineteenth Century Forlorn

Author:Mason Cooley

“If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being "mother's only accomplishment," today's children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child's needs are thus a cultural football in an economic and marital game.”

Ifs Needs May Children Ideas Today Mother Suffering Games Parent Class Cases Economic Middle Century Football Accomplishment Middle Class

Author:Arlie Russell Hochschild

“Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world--an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrounds, of lead paint, rats and rat poisons, or a rural world where families do not enjoy the minimal levels of public health accepted as standard for nearly a century. Whether in city or country, this is a world where cavities go unfilled and ear infections threatening permanent deafness go untreated. It is world where even a small child learns to be ashamed of the way he or she lives.”

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.”

Children Causes Parent Family Century Divorce Separation Chiefs Quarters Sixty Family Life Nineteenth Century American Family Idyllic

Book:Childhood's Future

Source: Childhood's Future

“Leadership is the great challenge of the 21st century in science, politics, education, and industry. But the greatest challenge in leadership is parenting. We need to do more than just get our enterprises ready for the challenges of the twenty-first century. We also need to get our children ready for the challenges of the 21st century.”

Needs Firsts Children Challenges Century Ready Industry Twenties Our Children Enterprise 21st Century

Author:Jim Rohn

“If we are going to compete in this world we're in today, there is no possible way we can do it with lowering expectations and dumbing down everything. Children are going to suffer and families' hearts are going to be broken that their kids won't be able to get a job in the 21st Century.”

Ifs World Way Heart Children Kids Today Able Jobs Suffering Can Do Century This World Broken Expectations 21st Century Dumbing Down

Author:Jeb Bush

“I found myself wondering, what would it be like to have a strange woman living in your home, nursing your child? My resulting research into the private lives of women in the 18th and 19th centuries inspired me and provided the backbone for [Lady of Milkweed Manor] novel.”

Children Home Found Wonder Novel Century Strange Research Our Children Inspired Your Children Private Life Nursing 19th Century Backbone Milkweed

Author:Julie Klassen

“Our children must be offered an education up to par with thier potential-and equal to the needs of the Twenty-first century.”

Needs Firsts Children Century Equal Twenties Our Children

Author:Oliver DeMille

“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child's duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”

Firsts Children Self States Helping Individual Parent Goal Cases Clear Modern Century Duty Conflict Commitment Tests Treatment Self Control Puritan 17th Century

Author:C. Sommerville

“To teach your child to only be a Muslim in Muslim spaces or only a Christian in Christian spaces means in a way that you're teaching them a religious identity that is relevant to only a very small part of their lives, because the vast majority of their lives in the 21st century are going to be lived in interaction with others.”

“The only way we can give our children the best education in the world and prepare them for the next century is by funding the programs that serve them.”

World Way Giving Children Next Century Program Our Children Funding Best Education

Author:Paul Newman

“The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.”

Men Children Problem Three Darkness Century Hunger Degradation Proletariat Subjection Atrophy

Book:Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.”

Way Want Children Long Pain Suffering House Grows Parent Voice Forget Century Adults Skins Embrace Curse Seconds Freeze Another Time Stop Time Hoarse Voice

Author:Alan Lightman

“I believe that in the course of the next century the notion that it's a woman's duty to have children will change and make way for the respect and admiration of all women, who bear their burdens without complaint or a lot of pompous words!”

Way Believe Children Courses Next I Believe Century Duty Bears Notion Burden Admiration Complaints Pompous

Book:The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition

“Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now.”

Children Whole Seems Lasts Moving Artist Sides Healing Century New York Musician London Gentle Holocaust Memorial Berlin Having Children Hiroshima Holocaust Memorial

Author:Robert Montgomery