Twentieth quotes:

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  • The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. -- Norman Mailer
  • Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity. -- Robert H. Schuller
  • It's the Twentieth Century ... no more miracles. -- Clifford Odets
  • It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead. -- Kim Stanley
  • Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature. -- Helen Vendler
  • Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky. -- Guillaume Apollinaire
  • The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia. -- Joseph Jacobs
  • Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. -- Joseph Brodsky
  • I got good notice from that show, and on the last day of filming Townies, Twentieth Century Fox called wanting to meet with me about a development deal. -- Jenna Elfman
  • We are so utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a Power the Twentieth Century does not reckon with.... Oh that God would make us dangerous! -- Jim Elliot
  • I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers. -- Paul Theroux
  • I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing. -- Art Spiegelman
  • By the end of the Twentieth Century, taxation will be reduced to a minimum, the entire world will be open to trade, and there will be no need of a standing army. -- Erastus Wiman
  • The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men ... [but] The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story. -- Mary Ritter Beard
  • Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.' -- Emmet Gowin
  • The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath. -- John Green
  • Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead. -- Jim Morrison
  • Twentieth century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance. -- Kingsley Amis
  • It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature. -- Frederick Rolfe
  • Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values. -- Al Alvarez
  • In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven. -- Victor Hugo
  • Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. -- Marshall McLuhan
  • The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. -- Albert Camus
  • The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. -- Gertrude Stein
  • The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. -- W. E. B. Du Bois
  • I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. -- Werner Herzog
  • Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism. -- Benito Mussolini
  • If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times. -- Noam Chomsky
  • Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time. -- Margaret Mead
  • Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. -- Russell Baker
  • In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. -- Erich Fromm
  • The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world. -- Alain Aspect
  • I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse. -- Bing Crosby
  • The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof. -- Anzia Yezierska
  • Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time. -- Robertson Davies
  • Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race. -- Hunter S. Thompson
  • It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. -- Freeman Dyson
  • Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them. -- Robert Reich
  • I don't know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century. -- Russ Feingold
  • In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment. -- E. L. Doctorow
  • Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century. -- Dennis Prager
  • When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism. -- Martin Filler
  • One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything. -- Malcolm Muggeridge
  • The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair. -- Maya Angelou
  • The twentieth century belongs to Canada. -- Wilfrid Laurier
  • Christian art today should be twentieth-century art. -- Francis Schaeffer
  • Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation -- Robert Motherwell
  • Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible. -- Jill Lepore
  • This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts. -- A. L. Rowse
  • The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. -- Norman Mailer
  • The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century. -- Joseph Sobran
  • Success is failing nineteen times and soaring the twentieth. -- Julie Andrews
  • Perserverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth. -- Julie Andrews Edwards
  • I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers. -- Penelope Wilton
  • It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone. -- Haruki Murakami
  • Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century. -- Rush Limbaugh
  • Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. -- Greg Egan
  • Steadiness is coming up short 19 times and succeeding the twentieth. -- Julie Andrews
  • Twenty-first century medicine must not be confined to a twentieth-century bureaucracy. -- Charles W. Pickering
  • Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle. -- George Carlin
  • I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history. -- Robin G. Collingwood
  • It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  • What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America. -- Frank Crowninshield
  • The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism. -- Irving Kristol
  • Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century. -- Jack Vance
  • These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century. -- Miguel de Unamuno
  • The twentieth century saw the emergence of a Churchless Mission and a Missionless Church -- Eddie Gibbs
  • In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. -- Raoul Vaneigem
  • Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century. -- John Rothenstein
  • How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century, -- Muriel Spark
  • The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything. -- Louis Dudek
  • One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century. -- Jack the Ripper
  • History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight. -- Neil Armstrong
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  • The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century. -- Bill Henson
  • The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire. -- Tim Wu
  • 'Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. -- John Lahr
  • Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. -- John Lahr
  • Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. -- Marcel Proust
  • How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! -- John Milton
  • The late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery. -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it. -- David Novak
  • In the late twentieth century, staying sober has become just as much an addiction as getting wasted. -- Dennis Miller
  • Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century. -- Salman Rushdie
  • News objectivity is a twentieth-century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it. -- Frank Miller
  • The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book. -- Alec-Tweedie
  • Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism. -- Angela Carter
  • What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. -- James Fenton
  • In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake. -- Pat Conroy
  • Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. -- Aldous Huxley
  • Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century. -- Leonard Nimoy
  • Because the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue. -- Dalai Lama
  • There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene. -- Harold E. Varmus
  • Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. -- Arundhati Roy
  • There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasnt heard it. -- Helen Reddy
  • The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty? -- Brigid Brophy
  • Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions. -- A. J. P. Taylor
  • Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors. -- Faye Moskowitz
  • One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends. -- Caryl Rivers
  • exile ... might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century. -- Phyllis Chesler
  • The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism. -- Douglas Rushkoff
  • The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. -- James Howard Kunstler
  • The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind. -- Henri Bergson
  • We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them. -- Steve Toltz
  • The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid. -- Gertrude Stein
  • The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. -- Norman Mailer
  • War was a hellish, horrible hideous thing - too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilised nations. -- Lucy Maud Montgomery
  • Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language. -- Jerome Kern
  • On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. -- Thornton Wilder
  • Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure. -- Thomas Szasz
  • I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. -- David Mitchell
  • The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached. -- Fareed Zakaria
  • Nevertheless, during the sixty years of the twentieth century many problems have come increasingly into the realm of acceptable public discussion. -- Herman Kahn
  • Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good. -- Jerry Saltz
  • The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. -- Aldo Leopold
  • Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams. -- Arthur Compton
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