Twentieth Century 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
It's the Twentieth Century ... no more miracles. -- Clifford Odets
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
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
I challenged myself to write/direct a romantic comedy. People trash talk the rom com, but it's one of the oldest cinematic genres, with stellar origins like Twentieth Century and Trouble in Paradise. I think as audiences lost their innocence, the genre lost its suspense. To create suspense, you need obstacles, so I gave my couple an obstacle that very few people ever overcome: their own behavior and their past. -- Leslye Headland
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
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time. -- Margaret Mead
If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times. -- Noam Chomsky
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
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
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
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
On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy. -- Carroll Quigley
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
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 tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects. -- Martin Filler
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
I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers. -- Penelope Wilton
The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century. -- Joseph Sobran
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century. -- Rush Limbaugh
Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. -- Greg Egan
Twenty-first century medicine must not be confined to a twentieth-century bureaucracy. -- Charles W. Pickering
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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 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
What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America. -- Frank Crowninshield
These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century. -- Miguel de Unamuno
Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century. -- Jack Vance
The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism. -- Irving Kristol
In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. -- Raoul Vaneigem
The twentieth century saw the emergence of a Churchless Mission and a Missionless Church -- Eddie Gibbs
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
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History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight. -- Neil Armstrong
One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century. -- Jack the Ripper
The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century. -- Bill Henson
'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
The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire. -- Tim Wu
In the late twentieth century, staying sober has become just as much an addiction as getting wasted. -- Dennis Miller
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
The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book. -- Alec-Tweedie
Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky. -- Guillaume Apollinaire
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
There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene. -- Harold E. Varmus
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
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. -- Aldous Huxley
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. -- Arundhati Roy
What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. -- James Fenton
Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism. -- Angela Carter
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake. -- Pat Conroy
One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends. -- Caryl Rivers
Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors. -- Faye Moskowitz
exile ... might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century. -- Phyllis Chesler
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
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
Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions. -- A. J. P. Taylor
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
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
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. -- Aldo Leopold
Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language. -- Jerome Kern
The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia. -- Joseph Jacobs
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 war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. -- Norman Mailer
I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. -- David Mitchell
War was a hellish, horrible hideous thing - too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilised nations. -- Lucy Maud Montgomery
The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid. -- Gertrude Stein
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 played ten injury-free years between the ages of 12 and 22. Then, suddenly, it seemed like I was allergic to the twentieth century. -- Nigel Melville
The disgrace of the church in the twentieth century is that more zeal is evident among Communists and cultists than among Christians. -- William MacDonald
The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before. -- Ron Silver
The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before -- Ron Silver
The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen. -- Quentin Crisp
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Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams. -- Arthur Compton
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
The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism. -- Will Hutton
The rhinoceros stood ... about five hundred yards away ... not a twentieth-century animal at all, but an odd, grim straggler from the Stone Age. -- Winston Churchill
The twentieth century must be a century of the Blessed Sacrament if it means to be a century of resurrection and of life -- Pope Leo XIII
America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth. -- Michael Martin Hammer
Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century. -- Christopher Hitchens
The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century - glossy, brash, and insecure. -- Ilka Chase
The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism. -- Albion Woodbury Small

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