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Century Quotes

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Century Quotes

“Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.”

Source: JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated): Picturesque California, The Treasures of the Yosemite, Our National Parks, Steep Trails, Travels in Alaska, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf, Save the Redwoods, The Cruise of the Corwin and more

“After long centuries, agrarian civilization is weakening. Is sufficient attention being devoted to the arrangement and improvement of the life of the country people, whose inferior and at times miserable economic situation provokes the flight to the unhappy crowded conditions of the city outskirts, where neither employment nor housing awaits them?”

“They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.”

Ifs Men May Has Beens Hands Would Be Lost Loses Perfect Behinds Gone Generations Century Limits Gains Perfection Improvement Invention Great Men Reaching Receiving Lag

Author:Eugene Delacroix

“The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.”

“The ingredients that made this country, you know, the miracle of the world - I mean we had a seven for one improvement in the average American standard of living in the 20th century.”

Knows World Mean Made Country Century Standards Miracle Seven Average Improvement Ingredients 20th Century Standards Of Living

Author:Howard Warren Buffett

“We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.”

“The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and the human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A continuation of similar exertions is everyday rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family.”

Source: The Works of John Adams Vol. 4: Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, Defence of the Constitution I

“The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement... has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century... It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today... But then came the First World War... What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history.”

“The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century - medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things - the doers - are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.”

Source: Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays