Best Twentieth Century Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 4

“The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences.”

Source: Situationism: A Compendium

“Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.”

Giving Long Millions Century Determination Scales Ideology Thanks Justification Twentieth Century Steadfastness

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.”

“Twentieth-century man needs to be reminded at times that work is not the result of the Fall. Man was made to work, because the God who made him was a 'working God.' Man was made to be creative, with his mind and his hands. Work is part of the dignity of his existence.”

Men Needs Mind Made Hands Fall Results Existence Creative Century Dignity Be Creative Twentieth Century

Book:A Heart for God

Source: A Heart for God

“The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.”

Worst Century Gay Damn Twentieth Century Being Gay Disco Disco Music

Author:Quentin Crisp

“It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Book Country Philosophy Fate Middle Century Realization Twentieth Century Intricate European Countries

Author:Czeslaw Milosz

“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 very quality of books to read and facts to master with which the twentieth-century man is confronted encourages him to think broadly and superficially about much, but hinders him from thinking deeply and thoroughly about anything.”

Thinking Men Book Facts Quality Century Masters Twentieth Century Hinder Thinking Deeply

Author:J. I. Packer

“A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.”

Years Important Ideas Powerful Fiction Century Couple Hundred Science Fiction Forgotten Philosopher Shallow Twentieth Century Very Powerful Fiction Writers Isaac

Author:Marvin Minsky

“Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.”

Believe I Believe Century Judging Late Atmosphere Pollution Twentieth Century Mr Spock

Author:Leonard Nimoy

“Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms . . . movie stars to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!”

“As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.”

Art I Can Century Bounds Twentieth Century

Author:Will Self

“One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford.”

“While it is a cause for regret that Fischer did not continue to produce scintillating games, he perhaps had a greater impact on chess than any other twentieth century player”

Games Causes Greater Player Century Produce Regret Impact Chess Twentieth Century Fischer

Author:John Nunn

“We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.”

“What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.”

“When Bill Gates started Corbis we were told that he needed images to fill those digital picture frames in his home, and many found this plausible. But now it's pretty clear that he's set out to control the visual history of the twentieth century.”

Home Found Clear Century Needed Bills Visuals Digital Gates Twentieth Century Plausible Picture Frames

Author:Philip Jones Griffiths

“Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes - his chief intellectual rival of the century - in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments.”

Way Mind Government Age Social Century Policy Battle Intellectual Scientist Died Fundamentals Chiefs March Economist Rivals Twentieth Century 1930s Hayek Keynes Friedrich Hayek

Author:Julian Simon

“If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.”

Ifs Has Beens Fantasy Century Figures Capitalism Argument Planning Socialism Contests Twentieth Century Demonstrating Hayek Central Planning Knockouts

Author:Kenneth Minogue

“. . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.”

“The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.”

Facts Fiction Century Twentieth Century Nineteenth Century Scientific Facts

Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton

“To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.”

Men Firsts Book Ends Matter Would Be Numbers Century Broken Letters Twenties Privilege Enormous Admire Obsessed Twentieth Century Joyce Ulysses Broken Man Transubstantiation

Author:Edna O'Brien

“Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.'”

Source: Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth

“I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient.”

People Thinking Way Kind Seems Found Century Strange Taste Ingredients Twentieth Century

Author:Billy Collins

“I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.”

World Firsts Reason School Lasts Law Influence Century Crosses Very Good Variety Pounds Biology Twentieth Century Best Times Sponges Dynasty American Poetry Pollination

Author:Sam Hamill

“My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy.”

“No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.”

Wells Technology Century Instinct Mindset Scales Instance Britain Shops Maximum Twentieth Century Great Britain

Author:Charles R. Morris

“According to the management expert Peter F. Drucker, the term "entrepreneur" (from the French, meaning "one who takes into hand") was introduced two centuries ago by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to characterize a special economic actor-not someone who simply opens a business, but someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield." The twentieth-century growth economist Joseph A. Schumpeter characterized the entrepreneur as the source of the "creative destruction" necessary for major economic advances.”

Source: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."”

Thinking Humans Looks Different Whole Stories Humanity Turns Jesus Human Beings Century Promise Theologian Twentieth Century Power Of Love Vantage Point

Author:John Shelby Spong

“The reason Ataturk, Kemal Ataturk was and is so highly reputed, is he was attempting to modernize… That’s not the right word. Well, it is. For lack of a better way of saying it, he was trying to make Islam compatible with the modern twentieth century world.”

World Way Trying Wells Reason Modern Century Islam Attempting Twentieth Century Better Ways Compatible Right Words Ataturk

Author:Rush Limbaugh

“In the early period of Left struggles, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were many different trajectories for the struggle, whether you call it 'syndicalism' or 'anarchism' or, at the time, 'social democracy', eventually 'Communism', these were different theories of struggle. But all of them shared a basic understanding that the people...experience exploitation, they experience oppression, but they're not prepared to rise up.”

“The prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century was both a cause and an effect of social and scientific breakthroughs that have redefined human life. The biggest change is simply that people live longer and have far more freedom to think about things other than staying alive.”

People Thinking Humans Social Causes Freedom Half Alive Effects Century Prosperity Human Life Staying Breakthrough Twentieth Century Staying Alive Live Free

Book:How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

Source: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“It was only in the late nineteenth century and then the twentieth century, with the maturation of consumer capitalism, that a shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We must appreciate this to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now know it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.”

“A woman was the property of her father or her husband and that remained true right into the twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that women had a guaranteed right to serve on federal juries.”

Father Century Husband Property Twentieth Century Jury

Author:Noam Chomsky

“It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.”

Thinking Knows Important Difficult Moral Clear Century Philosopher Eras Remembered Twentieth Century

Author:Allen W. Wood

“In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.”

Ifs Thinking Men Found Chance Simple Moral Happened Century Honest Perception Importance Philosopher Compare Modesty Schemes Acquaintance Twentieth Century Refusal Honest Man Emulate

Author:Allen W. Wood

“For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious.”

People Has Beens War Wanted Century West Decades Peaceful Afghanistan Soviet Twentieth Century Harmonious Pacific Taliban Anonymity

Author:Khaled Hosseini

“If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.”

Ifs Looks Problem Moving Century Huge Gun England Hardest Germany Target Platforms Technological Navy Twentieth Century Tricky

Author:Noam Chomsky

“In the twentieth century the Reformed tradition was developed in several ways including additional confessions (Barmen, the Belhar Confession, the 1967 Confession of the PC(USA), and so on). It was also significantly augmented by the work of important thinkers like Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, Jürgen Moltmann, Emil Brunner, Kathryn Tanner, and so on.”

Way Important Century Tradition Including Usa Thinker Confession Twentieth Century Barmen

Author:Oliver D. Crisp

“Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day.”

Use Today Faces Used Religious Enemy Teaching Modern Century Praying Kings Slavery Toms Uncles Luther Twentieth Century Resisting Defenseless Ku Klux Klan Plantations Uncle Tom Bloodhounds

Author:Malcolm X

“There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.”

Knows Years Firsts Children Law Parent Century Policy Majors Jew Immigration Immigrants Twentieth Century Exclusion Immigration Laws

Author:Noam Chomsky

“There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.”

School Law Study Century Example Strange University Myth Carrie Twentieth Century Virginia Law School Anglo Saxon

Author:Noam Chomsky

“I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.”

Art Form Courses Father Creative Century Photography Lows Concepts Appreciation Twentieth Century

Author:Ansel Adams

“We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.”

Problem Bigs Running Energy Left Stuff Levels Issues Growing Century Crisis Climate Climate Change Flood Going To Work Twentieth Century Supplies Big Problems Drought Food Supply

Author:Margaret Atwood

“Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.”

“To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it.”

Want Two Week Century Research Library University Plenty Remarkable Assets Journal Twentieth Century Two Days Archives

Author:John Shelby Spong

“The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.”

People Writing Christian Lasts Reading Left Church Christianity Trouble Century Jew Backgrounds Ignorant Twentieth Century Commentary Interpreting Christian Church Gentiles

Author:John Shelby Spong

“James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.”

“We stand today on the edge of a new frontier - the frontier of the 1960's - a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils - a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

Today Opportunity Threat Edges Peril 1960s Frontiers Twentieth Century New Frontiers

Author:John F. Kennedy

Twentieth Century Quotes

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Twentieth Century Quotes