Early 20th Century Quotes & Sayings

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all - the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism. — Christopher Hitchens

The two explorers are given fictional names. But as in real life, they travel to the Amazon roughly a generation apart, in the early-to-mid 20th century. In the film, they're both guided by Karamakate, as a young man early in the story and later as an old shaman. He and the outsiders share a desire for knowledge - self knowledge and an understanding of the world around them, says the film's co-screenwriter, Jacques Toulemonde. — Tom Cole

In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were independent; they were more self-confident. In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized. And when you have colonization, what do you have? You have anti-colonization. — Mustafa Akyol

Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century. — Adam Davidson

One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness. — Criss Angel

Adolescence was only recognised as a life stage in the early 20th century, when psychologists got down to work. Today's generational battle obscures the fact that adulthood is happening later. A new transitional stage has emerged after adolescence: the twenties. — Jane Ridley

China has existed within very roughly its present borders for over two millennia and for virtually the whole of that period saw itself as a 'civilisation state.' It was only when it was too weak to resist the western powers in the early 20th century that it finally acquiesced in an arrangement that was alien to it. — Martin Jacques

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82. — Daniel Clowes

Bringing Israel and modern Zionism into the subject of the Holocaust is to bring current (i.e. late 20th and early 21st Century) issues into a historical event that occurred on another continent altogether in the early-mid 20th Century. — James Morcan

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century. — Dwight Yoakam

I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother. — Morris Gleitzman

St. Louis has always been a great center for medicine. It has been a leader in the nation since the early part of the 20th century. Along with that, we've been a leader in medical science and biomedical science and innovation in medicine. — William Henry Danforth

Beyond the public relations efforts of platforms like Uber and Airbnb, there may be deeper reasons why the term "sharing economy" is so popular: It captures some of the thinking and the idealism of the early proponents of economy-wide sharing approaches. It hints at the shift away from faceless, impersonal 20th-century capitalism and toward exchange that is somehow more connected, more embedded in community, more reflective of a shared purpose. — Arun Sundararajan

You create reality by looking at it, is what Quantum Mechanics suggests. This may sound outrageously magical. Quantum Mechanics or QM, is the physics of the microscopic world. It is a strange theory that took birth in the early 20th century and continues to dazzle scientists and philosophers today. So much so, that QM is regarded as the gateway to the world of consciousness, bringing science and spiritualty together. Science has entered domain of philosophy and consciousness/spirituality through Quantum Mechanics, making it a hot topic for debate among intellectuals from both scientific and philosophical domains. Some physicists even insist on making philosophy of physics! — Sharad Nalawade

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. — Paul Davies

Not being able to address the attribution of change in the early 20th century to my mind precludes any highly confident attribution of change in the late 20th century. — Judith Curry

Today in America, we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change, but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years. — Janet Napolitano

All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century. — Tony Judt

Prior to the early 20th century, for the totality of humankind's existence if they saw something moving, it meant it was there. If they saw a tiger walking, that meant they were near a live tiger. This was entrenched in our subconscious and our unconscious.Then that drastically changed with film and television. — Chuck Klosterman

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees ... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete ... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete. — Philip Pearlstein

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism. — Will Sergeant

'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way. — William Gibson

Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses. — Paul Engle

Until the Left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent - look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the Left has gotten for education - America now spends more per student than any country in the world - the worse the academic results. And the Left has removed God and dress codes from schools - with socially disastrous results. — Dennis Prager

I suppose I thought your mind would be full of dresses and dances."
"Well, it's not. It's full of Socrates and Euclid. — Leila Rasheed

When you have the countries like Germany, China, and Russia decline, and be replaced by others, that's when systemic wars start. That's when it gets dangerous, because they haven't yet reached a balance. So Germany united in 1871 and all hell broke loose. Japan rose in the early 20th century, and then you had chaos. So we're looking at a systemic shift. Be ready for war. — George Friedman

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

All of my grandparents came to the United States from Italy during the early years of the 20th century. I believe that my grandparents came here to take advantage of the opportunities furnished by a growing country with an open society. — Samuel Alito

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

The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution. — Britt Daniel

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it. — Clifford Geertz

There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years. — Eric Ries

From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two. — Michael Dirda

Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century. — Krista Tippett

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West. — John Keegan

I'd like to be remembered not only for my body of work but also for specific novels. Ideally, I want to be remembered in the same way as Stephen King, who defined and exemplified excellence in the horror genre in the late 20th and early 21st century. — Nicholas Sparks

Based on theoretical analysis, clinical observations, and some research findings, as well as on 19th and early 20th century literature on dissociation, we propose that traumatization essentially involves a degree of dissociative division of the personality that likely occurs along the lines of innate action systems of daily life and defense - what has been called structural dissociation of the personality. Dissociation of the personality develops when children or adults are exposed to potentially traumatizing events, and when their integrative capacity is insufficient to (fully) integrate these experiences within the confines of a relatively coherent personality. — Onno Van Der Hart

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more "evolved" than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin's model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others. — Bodie Hodge

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

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. — Pankaj Mishra

I believe that my children, who are young, will look back on the early years of the 21st century in rather the same way I look back on the middle of the 20th: as a time when seemingly respectable people supported discrimination against Americans simply because those Americans were different from themselves. — Jon Meacham

I sent the first half of the dissertation to Rudolf Bultmann [major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity] as a courtesy with an invitation to respond to any points in my analysis and critique if he wished. I was speechless when I received a long letter from Bultmann, who had diligently examined the details of my arguments. His letter became a featured part of the publication in 1964 by Westminster Press of Radical Obedience: The Ethics of Rudolf Bultmann: With a Response by Rudolf Bultmann.
That book, more than any other , launched my career as a serious theologian. But it also led to my reputation as a situation ethicist, ironically just about the time I was beginning to disavow situation ethics. — Thomas C. Oden

My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list! — Mark Frauenfelder

Warnings about children being overscheduled, racing from one enriching activity to the next, first surfaced in the early 20th century. — Carl Honore

The early development of speed reading can be traced to the beginning of the (20th) century, when the publication explosion swamped readers with more than they could possibly handle at normal reading rates. — Tony Buzan

I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years, both as a player and a vocalist, particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century. — Jeff Healey

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something. — Colin Meloy

The downside was that for 400 years, science has grown up, has arisen and developed as a purely materialist concept and avoided the subject of mind and consciousness, leaving it to the realm of religion. Only with the founding of quantum science in the early part of the 20th century have we realized that the Cartesian Duality is wrong, that body, mind, physicality do interact and they're interrelated. — Edgar Mitchell

I live in the Dark Ages, the 17th century. Actually, I would have loved to be in Paris in the early 20th century when the Ballets Russes were there and Chanel was designing. — Iris Apfel

In the early 20th century the need to find this missing link became so desperate that an elaborate hoax was created. Piltdown Man ("discovered" in 1912) was believed to be genuine for over 40 years. In fact is was faked using a Medieval human skull, the jaw bone of an orangutan and fossilized teeth from a chimpanzee, and then "aged" by soaking it in acid and staining it with an iron solution. — Ellis Silver

If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us. — Alan Moore

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals. — N. T. Wright

Can't you clerk in a store?'
'No.'
'Can't you be a waitress?'
'Would you be anything like you're suggesting to me? Then why, if you're too good, is it all right for me?'
'It's not a question of superiority, Dora. Come on, be a telephone operator and get paid while you work. Or how about ushering in a theater? I have it. You'll get a job in a flower shop. They always do.'
He looked at her so sharply that she knew she must make some answer, and she began to speak as if her words came from another mind, another mouth. 'I am beyond this plane of animal existence. I'm made of different stuff. I lived all this ages ago and I'm through with it for good. — Margery Latimer