Century Quotes

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I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.

We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century.

John F. Kennedy

In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with, was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.

Thomas Jefferson

During my testimony (to the House Science and Technology Committee) in May I said, Some question why Americans should return to the Moon. After all, they say we have already been there. I find that mystifying. It would be as if 16th century monarchs proclaimed that we need not go to the New World, we have already been there. Or as if President Thomas Jefferson announced in 1803 that Americans need not go west of the Mississippi, the Lewis and Clark Expedition has already been there. Americans have visited and examined 6 locations on Luna, varying in size from a suburban lot to a small township. That leaves more than 14 million square miles yet to explore.

Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words-before it is too late. May we solemnly realize that we shall never be true sons of our heavenly Father until we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face.

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art.... In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

What we must create is the man of the twenty-first century, although this is still a subjective and not a realised aspiration. It is precisely this man of the next century who is one of the fundamental objectives of our work...

With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century

Winston Churchill

[Jefferson was] perhaps the most incapable executive that ever filled the presidential chair.… It would be difficult to imagine a man less fit to guide a state with honor and safety through the stormy times that marked the opening of the present century.

Theodore Roosevelt

Anyone who attempts to predict the history of the next ten years is a rash man, and if he attempts to make his forecast for a century he is very properly regarded as so foolhardy as not to be worth listening to at all.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.

Lincoln-sad, patient, kindly Lincoln, who after bearing upon his weary shoulders for four years a greater burden than that borne by any other man of the nineteenth century laid down his life for the people whom living he had served as well-built upon his early study of the Bible.

Theodore Roosevelt

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is, to meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege I think.

Emily Dickinson

Perfectionism, no less than isolationism or imperialism or power politics, may obstruct the paths to international peace. Let us not forget that the retreat to isolationism a quarter of a century ago was started not by a direct attack against international cooperation but against the alleged imperfections of the peace.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is a mistake, he said, to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.

Rudyard Kipling

A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day.

Kings were put to death long before 21 January, 1793, and before the regicides of the nineteenth century. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interesting in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.

We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt