Century Quotes

In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.

We Americans sit at the head of the banquet table, as we have done for a century. Our standard of living is luxurious by any measure.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

Clear, crisp, and compelling. . . . Mitzvah Girls is a thoughtful look at the world of Jewish girls who grow up in 21st-century America, but don't really.

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.

One life is but a single act. One body - a garment. One century - a day. One task - an experience. One triumph - an acquisition. One death - a breath of renovation.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.

No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.

The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.

If the schooling system does not rapidly close the gap between what it does, and what it should do in response to the demands of the 21st century, it will simply become irrelevant.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.

Only recently, during the nineteenth century, and then only in Europe, do we meet forms of the state which have been created by a deliberate national feeling.

You’ll never have a 16-team playoff in college football. The most that could happen would be four teams in the next century. But after that, I’m dead, so who cares?

Gandhi: Ninny of the 20th Century.

I am very proud of the quality of public education in Nebraska, but I believe we have an obligation to continually assess whether our system is meeting 21st Century education needs.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

Think of Europe in the 20th century. Two World Wars generated by nationalism. France, Germany, Britain fighting with each other.

As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

The Internet is the stained glass picture of the 21st century.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

At the rate we're going, the 21st century looks pretty clear. It's going to be pretty violent

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large.

In another couple centuries I'm sure that worldview won't even exist. There's no evidence for it.

I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.

Bill Clinton is the greatest president of the 20th century because I played touch football with him.

Coaching is destined to be the leadership approach of the 21st century.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

The new century has brought on its own terrible dangers, which although not reaching the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War, still have the capacity to shake our world.

Let's bring it up to date with some snappy nineteenth century dialogue.

People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

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

Distraction is the most corrosive disease of the 20th century.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

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

The story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness. Thus the Western Empire died.

Eisenhower is my choice as the American of the 20th Century. Of all the men I've studied and written about, he is the brightest and the best.

Titles are too "thin" for the nineteenth century.

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.

If there is one clear lesson of our century, it is this: where aggression is tolerated, it multiplies.