Century Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I am descended from Irish immigrants. A century ago, the Irish knew well how American society—and law enforcement—viewed them: as drunks, ruffians, and criminals. Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the paddy wagon.

I have a big legacy of The Clash to live up to and I don't intend to uriny on a legend. I intend to build forward into the next century. The music has to be by the musicians, and there's too much changing things by the record company. I got a message for everyone in a record company: We don't care if you lose your job! You ruin music and I'll get all the smoothers out off the way, the people who smooth the sound off. Let the musicians have the music the way they want it, and not the way you think the grandmothers and 3-year olds will gonna buy it. Cause this is not about 3-year olds or grandmothers... This is Rock and Roll!

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.

Diplomacy is about surviving till the next century—politics is about surviving till Friday afternoon.

Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much pubilicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the gratest Canada has produced in this century.

The discovery of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century implied the beginning of a return to a type of civilization dominated by the eye rather than the ear.

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?

Dejan Stojanovic

Voluntary assimilation, known as Indianization in the Americas, is one response that has occurred at other places and in other times when two cultures collided. An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered. That does not happen very often, but it did occur when the Hyksos conquered Egypt about 1700 B. C. and when the Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B. C.

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.

I am a little to the right of... Why is the Attila comparison used? Fifth-century Hunnish depredations on the Roman Empire were the work of an overpowerful executive pursuing a policy of economic redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores. I am a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.

Out of our first century of national life we evolved the ethical principle that it was not right or just that an honest and industrious man should live and die in misery. He was entitled to some degree of sympathy and security. Our conscience declared against the honest workman's becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that he very often did.

Frances Perkins

Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter half of the 19th Century is its SPEED

William Rathbone Greg

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since this short book was first published. So much has happened in this time. In 1942, the book involved presentation that I described as 'history shading into legend'. Today, we in Kenya are making our own history, as an independent Republic. In the dark years of the war, when this work was written, social studies might have seemed absurdly academic, were it not for the living faith of a Christian society. A generation later, we find a new perspective, a greater and more universal enlightenment, brought about by swifter communications and mass media which probe into and make familiar all the social patterns of our human family.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

The magicians of the 19th century, enthralled by the science of optics, photography and electricity, opened the door to motion pictures and thereby rendered themselves obsolete. Any amateur with a pair of scissors can cut and edit a strip of film in order to make a woman vanish, sever a head, burn a body down to the skeleton and reverse time. Talent went out of style.… People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work.

He ran a gas station down in St. Louis… No, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader of the 20th century.

Hillary Clinton

But what has made this problem special for amateurs is that there's a tiny possibility that there does exist an elegant 17th-century proof.

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations great or small — to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

Adlai Stevenson II

A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

Tzvetan Todorov

No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But... the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

We don't know exactly when out fossil fuels will run out... but by the end of the century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually non-existent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries.... We are at the peak of a remarkable two-hundred-year glitch in the history of civilization and are about to embark on the descent. The coming changes will be earth-shattering.

Because of this global uncertainty, the visionary and the adventurous amongst us will get to shape the future of the twenty-first century—the church included.