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Century Quotes

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“By far the most dangerous people in the world are optimists (those who believe that all can be made well here below). If you think all can be made well in this world, then you will go to any extreme to make it happen. There is the story of the 20th century. As Lenin said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs".”

“A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.”

“To confound the tyranny of man there should exist for a century a third sex, both male and female, and stronger than men. This new sex would prove with the lash that men as well as women are made for its pleasure; and then you would hear men protesting against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex and admitting that strength should not be the sole rule of right. Just why do they refuse to grant the women the independence which they would demand from the third sex?”

“Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.”

“The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation.”

“An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens than a republic armed by foreign forces. Rome and Sparta were for many centuries well armed and free. The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom. Among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible. It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willingly one who is unarmed; or that any unarmed man will remain safe among armed servants.”

“Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.”

“The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.”

“Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.”

“Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.”

“Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.”

“The political structure in different countries has different origins, different developments. Something which suits one country extremely well would perhaps fail completely in another. Germany, through the long centuries of monarchy, has always had a leadership principle. ... The position of the Catholic Church rests now, as before, on the clear leadership principle of its hierarchy. And I think I can also say that of Russia, too.”

“Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.”

“If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is. Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he waited a thousand years before doing it. They forget to say that he is the slowest mover in the universe, that his Eye That Never Sleeps, might as well, since it takes a century to see what any other eye can see in a week.”

“The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.”

“As I travel around the world, it's fascinating; European leaders, Asian leaders, they all say to me, America is actually poised to be the world leader for another century - if we can fix some of this political dysfunction. ... We've got a lot of national security challenges, but if we get our economy together, and if we can get our political system to work well, I am really confident about our future.”

“There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.”

“The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.”

“17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.”