Century Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.

Leonard Bernstein

The nineteenth century moved fast and furious, so that one who moved in it felt sometimes giddy, watching it spin; but the eleventh moved faster and more furiously still. The Norman conquest of England was an immense effort, and its consequences were far-reaching, but the first crusade was altogether the most interesting event in European history. Never has the western world shown anything like the energy and unity with which she then flung herself on the East, and for the moment made the East recoil. Barring her family quarrels, Europe was a unity then, in thought, will and object. Christianity was the unit.

The world has produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least 5 trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible.

Scenario: In the summer of 1977 The Human League was formed due to the members finding no conventional channels for their immense talents.
Background: None of The Human League have any orthodox musical training, but prefer to regard compositions as an extension of logic, inspiration and luck. Therefore, unlike conventional musicians, their influences are not so obvious.
Conclusion/Manifesto: Interested in combining the best of all worlds, The League would like to positively affect the future by close attention to the present, allying technology with humanity and humour. They have been described as 'Later Twentieth Century Boys' and 'Intelligent, Innovatory and Immodest'.

The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Then the Chinese whisper of a countdown spreads across the crowd,
first to be lit by a century's morning,
mad to say they were there and then when the moment came,
wild for the starlight that passes for meaning.

I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try.

We may add that the Poland of the fifteenth century was one of the most civilised states of Europe.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Within a century or so after the discovery of America, more than fifty new foods had been carried back to the Old World, including maize, turkey, white potato, pumpkin, squash, the so-called Jerusalem artichoke, avocado, chocolate, and several kinds of beans. (Potatoes and maize now rank second and third in total tonnage of the world's crops, behind rice but ahead of what is probably man's oldest cultivated grain, wheat.) The European has turned for relief to drugs and pharmaceuticals the Indians discovered: quinine, ephedrine, novocaine, curare, ipecac, and witch hazel.

She turned, as always, to analysis, being a twentieth-century woman and so subject to the superstition that what the mind could understand couldn't any longer hurt the heart, that what the tongue could utter was in the hand's control.

In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.

W. E. B. Du Bois

This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man.... it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man,"... able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within.... here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight.

Lancelot Law Whyte

It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetics were first made. The words "evolution" and "origin of species" are now so intimately associated with the name of Darwin that we are apt to forget that the idea of a common descent had been prominent in the minds of naturalists before he wrote, and that, for more than half a century, zealous investigators had been devoting themselves to the experimental study of that possibility. Prominent among this group of experimenters may be mentioned Koelreauter, John Hunter, Herbert Knight, Gartner, Jordan. Naudin, Godron, Lecoq, Wichura — men whose names are familiar to every reader of "Animals and Plants under Domestication."

William Bateson

It's been almost a century that Edward's been alone. Now he's found you. You can't see the changes we see, we who have been with him for so long. Do you think any of us want to look into his eyes for the next hundred years if he loses you?

Stephenie Meyer

A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!"

When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.

The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect.

To the souls that have been shattered by the doubts and negativism of this century, we return the comfort of great truths. We do not question God and virtue; we do not question Country and History; we do not question authority and its prestige; we do not question Family and morals; we do not question the glory and duty of Work.

António de Oliveira Salazar

Yet today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century — for industrial age operations, rather than for information age battles. There is almost no relationship between our budget priorities and a strategic vision. The last seven years have been wasted in inertia and idle talk. Now we must shape the future with new concepts, new strategies, new resolve.

Ninth-century castles were relatively small and simple affairs designed to safeguard a relatively small number of people and intended as a refuge during times of trouble.

Marilyn Stokstad

We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

Madeleine L'Engle

It was a strange combination to absorb - the everyday concerns of the town doctor stuck in the middle of a discussion of his early days in seventeenth-century London.

Stephenie Meyer