Quotes & Sayings About 100 Years Ago

I wake up in the morning and I still have a passion for what I do, and I'll be doing it when I'm 105, I'll be scribbling away. If it was 100 years ago I'd be sitting by the campfire, saying, "Have I got a story to tell you." — Jackie Collins

This country belongs to all of us. We made this country from nothing, from mud-flats ... Over 100 years ago, this was a mud-flat, swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear! — Mr. Lee

Growing up, it was always, 'If you buy kosher meat, they're killed humanely.' But I've seen so many horrible videos. What we thought was humane 100 years ago is not humane anymore. The ways animals suffer, I just couldn't be a part of it anymore. — Carol Leifer

Americans have always built for the future. That is why we established land grant colleges and passed the Homestead Act to open our Western lands more than 100 years ago. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan. Today it's called the PGA Tour. — Alex Hay

In the history of each sport, the heroes who win the Olympic gold medal are the ones we remember. Nobody remembers the World Champion 25 years ago, but everyone remembers who the Olympic Champions were, even 100 years ago. — Lavinia Milosovici

My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life. — Christopher Walken

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us. — Stefan Molyneux

Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I've heard educated white people say, 'slavery was 400 years ago.' No it very wasn't. It was 140 years ago ... that's two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy. — Louis C.K.

It's a sleepy, wonderful, idyllic town but there's a curse on it from 100 years ago, ... The people who died in this kind of boating accident have come back to take their revenge. — Selma Blair

I am chilled by the realization of how similar circumstances in Europe in 2013 are to those of 100 years ago. — Jean-Claude Juncker

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. — Yuval Noah Harari

How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?" The answer is. "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.They're immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150 years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar. — Peter Senge

A few years ago, they [Neandertals] were thought to be ancestral to anatomically modern humans, but now we know that modern humans appeared at least 100,000 years ago, much before the disappearance of the Neandertals. Moreover, in caves in the Middle East, fossils of modern humans have been found dated 120,000-100,000 years ago, as well as Neandertals dated at 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, followed again by modern humans dated at 40,000 years ago. It is unclear whether the two forms repeatedly replaced one another by migration from other regions, or whether they coexisted in some areas — Francisco J. Ayala

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows
/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now. — Allen Ginsberg

All of us are linear thinkers. We evolved in a world that was local and linear. You know, back 100,000, 200,000, millions of years ago, when we were evolving as a human species, nothing changed. You know, the life of your great-grandparents, you, your kids - it was the same. And so we are local and linear thinkers. — Peter Diamandis

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he will donate $45 billion of his wealth to philanthropy. Two years ago, my husband and I decided to endow $100 million to set up the SOHO China Scholars. This program will give financial aid to Chinese students so they can attend the best universities in the world. — Zhang Xin

But 17 years ago, I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, with my bicycle, and with about 100 dollars. — Christiane Amanpour

[We're] told cars cause pollution. A 100 years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine? — P. J. O'Rourke

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. — James Baldwin

Let's say, 100 years ago, I'm not sure how many people had to empty out their relatives' homes; they just stayed in the same house, because they lived there. Nowadays, almost everyone, at least once in their life, somehow, has to deal with this experience. — Arnon Goldfinger

since the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve almost a century ago, we have printed roughly $800 billion from 1913 to 2007. But in 2013, the Fed printed more new money than that in just one year (see Figure 1.1) and will likely do the same in 2014. That's more money printing in one year than in nearly 100 years! — Robert A. Wiedemer

All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper. — Alan Kay

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States. — Harri Holkeri

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, 'It happened overnight.' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing. — Colson Whitehead

A few years ago I appeared on GLEE and, Jane Lynch and I did a remake of the song that was very popular - someone told me it was in the Top 100 when it was released. First, walking on the set of GLEE the day we filmed it was surreal as they had recreated the entire original set from the music video. It was bizarre - but fun. — Olivia Newton-John

Simply because one is Black or Latino or lesbian or gay or whatever does not guarantee the person's fidelity to a body of politics that empowers the particular constituency that they supposedly represent. The number of black elected officials has risen from 100 in 1964 to more than 9000 today. The number of African Americans who were in congress 30 years ago was about five; today it is over 40, an 800 percent increase. But have Blacks experienced an 800 percent increase in real power? It hasn't happened. So, I think the emphasis of this liberal notion of social change by working solely within the established electoral system is just fatally flawed. — Manning Marable

During the depression, people fought each other for boxes of groceries and if you were lucky you might get a few shillings for fighting six rounds. When Jack Johnson was World Heavyweight Champ, back in the early 1900s, Hartlepool had a brilliant boxer called Jasper Carter. People today will never have heard of him, but almost 100 years ago he put Hartlepool on the fistic map. — Stephen Richards

I'd like to bring magic back to the place it used to be 100 years ago. — David Blaine

With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black. — Jack White

If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago. — Mick Jagger

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today. — Jonathan Kozol

I contend that the reason why America is not as happy as it was in 1950 or 1920 or whenever, 100 years ago, is because our priorities are wrong, but it has nothing to do with exploiting the planet and has everything to do with losing faith in God. — Glenn Beck

Right now, we have the most complex relationship with technology that we've ever had. Your regular person has more technology in their life now than the whole world had 100 years ago. — Daniel H. Wilson

100 years ago, movies were black-and-white, silent, and 16 frames a second. So 100 years from now, what are they going to be? — Peter Jackson

Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear. — Kate Winslet

For one, a modified vegetable oil that makes asphalt less likely to crack in the winter or turn to tar in the summer. Cargill started selling it two years ago and has already shipped 30 million pounds of the product around the world. The plan is to be selling 100 million pounds of it a year by 2020. Another big win could be soybean oil that can be tweaked into foam for car seats. — Anonymous

[Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond. — Lionel Tiger

About eighty percent of the food on shelves of supermarkets today didn't exist 100 years ago. — Larry McCleary

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - 'It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject.' This was a very healthy attitude. — Karl Lagerfeld

I think we are evolving rapidly into one world culture. It's certainly one world economy. With billions of people online, I think we'll appreciate the wisdom in many different traditions as we learn more about them. People were very isolated and didn't know anything about other religions 100 years ago. — Ray Kurzweil

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, I learned so much today, that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old. — Francis Ford Coppola

Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago. Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day - there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnny. For him, it's all right there - it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for ... To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy. — Tom Verlaine

He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, 100 years ago, the taxidermist's grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a sabre, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist's grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought: Well, it's not like it's doing him any good. — David Sedaris

I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago. — Henry Ford

'She's Dynamite' was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n' roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n' roll. — B.B. King

I discovered years ago that the best results in this respect could be gained by running 100 miles weekly at my near best aerobic efforts and that, supplementary to this, running as many easy miles as I could — Arthur Lydiard

To put these events in perspective, it is helpful to imagine the entire course of human evolution, from the appearance of the first Homo habilis in Africa to the present, as taking place over the course of a single day. For convenience, let us start the clock with midnight representing 2.4 million years ago, which is within the range of when the genus Homo is thought to have emerged. In this time-compressed day, with each hour representing 100,000 years, humans left Africa at dawn, around 5 to 6 am. — Dimitra Papagianni

100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

A man today has to live with the reality of today. He can no longer live with the reality of 100 years ago. The world's changing so fast. Unless you are prepared to adapt every day, then you have a problem, because the world's not stopping. — Mario Testino

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. — Mark Kurlansky

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'. — Terry Pratchett

Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist. — Jose Andres

The extraordinary genius of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago was their recognition that the great wealth they had amassed could be put to public good and used to solve the complex problems for which there were no other sources of capital. — Judith Rodin

In China the largest denomination bill they have is 100 yen, and that's maybe $7. So here you have a whole economy working with only a $7 note as the largest denomination. The euro wants to get rid of the 500-euro bill just as the United States years ago got rid of the $1,000 bill because only the criminals used $1,000 bills. — Michael Hudson

The gun-control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts - or even the lives of other people. — Thomas Sowell

Not many years ago, nearly 100 percent of people who thought they were being constantly watched were certifiable paranoids. But recently it was revealed that, in the name of public safety, Homeland Security and more than a hundred other local, state, and federal agencies are operating aerial surveillance drones of the kind previously used only on foreign battlefields - at low altitudes outside the authority of air-traffic control. Soon, the bigger worry will not be that, as you walk your dog, you are secretly being watched but that the rapidly proliferating drones will begin colliding with one another and with passenger aircraft, and that you'll be killed by the plummeting drone that was monitoring you to be sure that you picked up Fido's poop in a federally approved pet-waste bag. — Dean Koontz

This (Coley's toxins) is really an effective treatment and it an OUTRAGEOUS crime of the century that we at MSK were able to cure cancer a 100 years ago that they can't cure today. — Ralph W. Moss

So the idea was that, some catastrophic event had happened. There was a long dark age and then out of that, 100 years ago in this world, seven barons - these men and women - rose up and formed the new society. It's a feudal world, a part feudal barons and part warlord and part mob boss and they each control a huge resource so that there's an uneasy alliance, but they all need each other. — Alfred Gough

I think the institute of marriage is a noble thing. The idea of a partner for life is incredibly romantic. But now we're living to 100. A hundred years ago people were dying at age 37. Til death do us part was a much different deal. — Debra Messing

The music industry was invented, like, 100 years ago. I'm talking about the goddess Matangi, who invented music 5,000 years ago. She was the only thing that inspired me. — M.I.A.

The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago. — Milton Friedman

Religious insights and values are just as important today as they were 50 or 100 years ago. — Dallin H. Oaks

Nearly 100 years ago, when Planned Parenthood was founded, birth control was illegal. — Cecile Richards

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago
throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer. — Gene Roddenberry

It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought ... hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really. — Judy Horacek

The key to happiness is loving yourself. For years I have struggled to reach this point and even now at the age of 20 I will be honest in saying I am not 100% there yet. However, I will say I am much closer to that 100 than I was 5 years ago. — Gabriela M. Sanchez

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

I'm afraid what we are building today will not have the same impact and sustainability of the architecture of a 100, 500 or 1,000 years ago. The buildings of those days were miracles. We don't perform such miracles today. So we should be a little more modest. For my part, I'll be glad to show one of my buildings one day to my grandchildren and say: I'm proud of that. — Zhang Xin

in the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won. About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens groups migrated north to the Levant, which was Neanderthal territory, but failed to secure a firm footing. — Yuval Noah Harari

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract. — Benoit Mandelbrot

Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In — Todd William

I am so envious of my colleagues from 100 years ago who only sang new works, they hardly ever sang revivals. — Renee Fleming

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now. — Reed Hastings

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges. — Umair Haque

If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

Why are we working so hard to preserve Iraq, a fake country to begin with? Why do we care whether this fake country that was drawn on the map 100 years ago remains? — Bill Maher

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas. — Seth Godin

We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don't really recognize the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago. — Malala Yousafzai

We cannot rely on mass inspection to improve quality, though there are times when 100 percent inspection is necessary. As Harold S. Dodge said many years ago, 'You cannot inspect quality into a product.' The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected. — W. Edwards Deming