Quotes & Sayings About 20th Century History

Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination. — Eckhart Tolle

The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented "century of genocide" (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, "Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history," and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides "are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative. — Steven Pinker

In the 20th century- an age in thrall to the new- women turn out to be the newest thing of all; still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species!We are the tulip- America- the Hula Hoop- the moon shot- cocaine! Everything we do is going to be, implicitly,amazing. — Caitlin Moran

The 20th century was a century in which human rights were infringed upon in numerous parts of the world, and Japan also bears responsibility in that regard. I believe that we have to look at our own history with humility and think about our responsibility. — Shinzo Abe

It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century. — John McCain

Virtually throughout its history, and certainly in the 20th century, California has been known as the place to go for dynamism and growth. It did not become the richest, most populous, and most productive state solely because of its weather and natural resources. So it takes a lot to turn California around from growth to contraction, from people moving into the state to a net exodus from the state, from business moving into California to businesses leaving California. It takes some doing. And the Left has done it. — Dennis Prager

So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war. — Steven Pinker

One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline. — Steven Pinker

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century. — Bertrand Piccard

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history. — Thomas C. Oden

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

At the end of a century that has seen
the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,
the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent. — Joseph Sobran

The Battle for the Philippines was the greatest naval battle in history, judged in terms of the number of ships taking part, the number of ships sunk, and the importance of its outcome. It included every form of naval warfare of the 20th century: gunnery duels between battleships; destroyer battles at night and by day, as ferocious and sustained as any at the Battle of Jutland; submarines that stalked the depths; sinking many ships; and finally, carrier warfare on a scale never dreamed of even by the most ardent enthusiasts of air warfare at sea. — Richard Hough

All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. — Terry Teachout

Nothing in recent history makes any sense without a deep understanding of WWII and The Holocaust. — A.E. Samaan

History of India From Ancient Times to the 20th Century by William W. Hunter — William W. Hunter

If you look at the history of how information flows, there was a time that newspapers were kind of in the place that Google and Facebook are now - how do we get more people to buy a copy? Then there was a shift in the early 20th century. They needed to do better, and readers and consumers demanded that of them. — Eli Pariser

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. — Terence McKenna

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex. — Donald Tusk

I'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people. — Alan Green

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost. — Sylvia Earle

The monumental tragedies of the 20th century -- a world-wide Great Depression, two devastating World Wars, the Holocaust, famines killing millions in the Soviet Union and tens of millions in China -- should leave us with a sobering sense of the threats to any society. But this generation's ignorance of history leaves them free to be frivolous -- until the next catastrophe strikes, and catches them completely by surprise. — Thomas Sowell

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence. — Alister E. McGrath

You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps. — Tony Judt

It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history — Margaret Beckett

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. — Jared Diamond

It is for Muslim scholars to study the whole history of Islamic science completely and not only the chapters and periods which influenced Western science. It is also for Muslim scholars to present the tradition of Islamic science from the point of view of Islam itself and not from the point of view of the scientism, rationalism and positivism which have dominated the history of science in the West since the establishment of the discipline in the early part of the 20th century in Europe and America. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. — George W. Bush

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles. — Gregory Benford

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery. — Todd Gitlin

The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups. — Tariq Ali

I did a lot of work with early 20th century attitudes, the kind of superficial notions and behavior that prompt people who don't know history very well to think that "people were different back then" - but beneath all that are characters who react in ways that we can all recognize, and will always be able to recognize. — James Vance

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century. — Milton Friedman

The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive. — Guy Maddin

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. — Noam Chomsky

Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas. — Don Tapscott

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world. — Emir Kusturica

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have. — Michael Haneke

The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa. — Arthur Herman

The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation. — Tom Brokaw

Gabriel Wilensky's book is an excellent introduction into the history of antisemitism in Europe. His words will rightly unsettle those who have yet to come to grips with Christianity's role in shaping European attitudes and policies towards Jews into the 20th century. — Jonathan Friedman

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

When the history of the 20th century is finally written, one of its key features will be the wanton slaughter of more than 170 million people, not in war, but by their own government. The governments that led in this slaughter are the former USSR (65 million) and the Peoples Republic of China (35-40 million). The point to remember is that these governments were the idols of America's leftists. Part of the reason for these and other tyrannical successes was because the people were first disarmed. — Walter E. Williams

Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question. — A.E. Samaan

The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour. — Sara Sheridan

Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter. — Nicholas Kristof

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse. — Theodore Dalrymple

Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god's existence? It makes no sense.
If the rivers of blood on Stalin's hands and Mao's hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years' worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It's not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god's likelihood of existence, then believers lose.
It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon. — Guy P. Harrison

The bigger the government, the more the corruption. It's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles that I am speaking of ... Do you know who has created the greatest evils of history? Big governments. Big SECULAR governments. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big States. Why would anybody trust the big state? It's amazing how many callers have imbued the college message that more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history. NO. More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history ... ... .and just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious. You don't learn THAT in college. — Dennis Prager