Quotes & Sayings About The 20th Century

Experience with tubercular patients would then help to train a new generation of specialist chest surgeons. In the second half of the 20th century, as the number of tuberculosis patients continued to decline and facilities were freed up, they were able to transfer their skills to other serious conditions within the thoracic cavity such as lung cancer, but that lay in the future. — Helen Bynum

The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight. — Ann Widdecombe

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. — Alan Moore

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel. — Gay Talese

Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates. — Alex Berenson

Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument. — Ellis Marsalis Jr.

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself. — David Starkey

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered. — John Steinbeck

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration. — Edith Hahn Beer

I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future. — FM-2030

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists. — Tariq Ali

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

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated. — Vladimir Putin

The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th. — Tina Brown

The light may be fading on the 20th century, but the sun is still rising on America. — William J. Clinton

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths. — Patricia Churchland

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed. — Howard Hodgkin

The result of these ungodly unions was a race of very wicked and very powerful hybrid (half-fallen angel, half-human) offspring - the Nephilim - who corrupted, harassed, even killed mankind. Now, at the end of the 20th century, we have the return of "alien" entities with apparent supernatural powers. — Chuck Missler

In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it. — Stephen Ambrose

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

I majored in political science, and my concentration was U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 20th century. — Sebastian Arcelus

When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt. — Chinua Achebe

Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you. — Harry Shearer

In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century. — Frederick Lenz

The chief danger of the 20th century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell. — William Booth

I think President Clinton was probably the brightest President of the 20th century. — Martin Sheen

It is amazing how many of the horrors of the 20th century were a result of charismatic quacks misleading millions of people to their own doom. What is even more amazing is that, after a century that saw the likes of Hitler, Lenin and Mao, we still see no need to distrust charisma as a basis for choosing leaders, either in politics or in numerous organizations and movements. — Thomas Sowell

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others). — George Pattison

The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart. — Jean Lorrain

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. — Wynton Marsalis

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did. — Douglas Coupland

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

Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater. — Robert Gottlieb

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence. — Adam Davidson

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere.
The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust — Raul Hilberg

The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy. — Alex Carey

Norman Rockwell, the Brueghel of the 20th century bourgeoisie, the Holbein of Jell-O ads and magazine covers; by common assent, the most American artist of all. — Jerry Adler

While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future. — Stephen Bayley

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. — Leonard Bernstein

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

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

Mama had a decayed tooth that was killing her. Our Jewish dentist was no longer allowed to practice, but with Pepi's help, Mama found an Aryan dentist who would pull the tooth. He wanted gold. Mama gave him a gold chain. He wanted more. She gave him another. He wanted more. She gave him her last. Three gold chains for one tooth. — Edith Hahn Beer

Joe Schenck, a top 20th Century-Fox executive, once said to me that he really believed I had a future, and that was because I was the only girl who could survive so many bad pictures. — Gene Tierney

More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day ... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal. — Nicholas D. Kristof

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century. — Carlos Fuentes

Metro, built in the late 20th century, is the most escalator-dependent system in the world. — Robert James Thomson

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

Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany. — Scott Berkun

In fact, the 20th century I think was the most fascinating century and the whole of man civilization because so much happened. — Joan Collins

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

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity. — Peter Drucker

I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me. — Robert Anton Wilson

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century. — Lawrence Summers

The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable. Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two. — Robert Fogel

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

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century. — Al Gore

The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a social role for men. — David Blankenhorn

Gandhi: Ninny of the 20th Century. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. — Robert Smithson

Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page. — Frank Harris

Nikola Tesla Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century — Sean Patrick

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement. — Jules De Goncourt

India is the Saudi Arabia of human resources for the 21st century. The power that we used to get from oil in 20th century, we will get it from people like you in 21st century. — Rahul Gandhi

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". — Robert Barron

If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual 20th century. — Ruth Bernhard

Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century. — Charles Krauthammer

Physical bookstores will become ever-nicer places to be. They are going to have more sofas, better lattes, nicer people working there. Good bookstores are the community centres of the 20th century. — Richard L. Brandt

By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone ... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine. — Max Nordau

Whether or not Enochian represents a valid system for causing "magical" change in consciousness, there is no question that Enochian is at the very heart of the 20th century occult and neopagan revival - Dee and Kelley's work is still detonating long past their deaths. It is possible, in fact, that we completely lack the ability to gauge their otherworldly work as a success or failure - as it seems to be unfolding on a millennial timespan, "outside the circles of time. — Jason Louv

By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy. — Thomas Sowell

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

Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam. — Ron Paul

What came in the end was only a small war and a quick victory; when the farmers and the gentlemen finally did coalesce in politics, they produced only the genial reforms of Progressivism; and the man on the white horse turned out to be just a graduate of the Harvard boxing squad, equipped with an immense bag of platitudes, and quite willing to play the democratic game. — Richard Hofstadter

'24' and 20th Century Fox and Sky TV are not responsible for training the U.S. military. It is not our job to do. To me, this is almost as absurd as saying, 'The Sopranos' supports the mafia, and by virtue of that, HBO supports the mafia.' — Kiefer Sutherland

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren. — Twyla Tharp

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism
the idolatry of the 20th century. — Cornel West

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle . — Eric Hobsbawm

Following Greece's defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1897, Greece's fiscal house was entrusted to a Control Commission. During the 20th century, the drachma was one of the world's worst currencies. It recorded the world's sixth highest hyperinflation. In October 1944, Greece's monthly inflation rate hit 13,800%. — Steve Hanke

I don't seem to fit really into the 20th Century — Charlton Heston

Solidarity was the best thing which happened in the 20th century. — Mikheil Saakashvili

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure. — Sheldon Lee Glashow

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J.G. Ballard

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

We told each other every funny story we could think of. One of them stays in my mind. A German citizen wants to commit suicide. He tries to hang himself, but the rope is of such a poor quality that it breaks. He tries to drown himself, but the percentage of wood in the fabric of his pants is so high that he floats on the surface like a raft. Finally he starves to death from eating official government rations. — Edith Hahn Beer

I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century. — David A. Adler

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

Every piece of progressive social legislation passed by Congress in the 20th century bears a union label. — George Meany

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century. — William Lyon Phelps

No other place can so convincingly claim to be the capital of capitalism, the capital of the 20th century and the capital of the world. — Kenneth T. Jackson

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike? — Karen Armstrong

I could not make the war seem real for myself. Even though I had heard about the Nazi bombing of cities in Spain, I couldn't imagine an air attack on unarmed civilians. Remember, there were still horses on the roads of rural Germany at that time. Very few people understood what modern war would be like. — Edith Hahn Beer

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century. — Edgar Mitchell

The farmers had grown proud and haughty. They ate better than anyone else in Germany now. And, like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves. All they had to do was feed the local Nazi power elite, and they could have all the slaves they wanted. — Edith Hahn Beer

It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only 6 miles long and 2 miles wide. — Barack Obama

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

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

The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom. — Jeff Sharlet

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god ... And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love's bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother's initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile ... A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response. — Huston Smith

We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century. — Oriana Fallaci

One of the things I'm real proud of is I just made a deal with 20th Century Fox, and I've got my own production company now. I'm developing some television and movies for other people because I have a lot of fresh new ideas. To write is what I love the most. — Dolly Parton