Century Quotes

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

Composers can do things that weren't allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book.

Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory: instead of fifteen minutes of fame, he will have fifteen centuries.

The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight.

There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.

the distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our century.

I'll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

In the 21st century, you have to use technology as one of the tools in the toolkit to bring about social change.

I was so absolutely riveted, I felt I was looking into the eyes of the artist. Art just closed the gap of time and space. The 16th century became as real to me as the 20th. It was something magical.

I'm making the comeback of the century.

The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.

What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.

It is a poor observance of our first century as a nation if we run up a flag of surrender with three dying maple leaves on it.

Blot out from the page of history the names of all the great actors of his time in the drama of nations, and preserve the name of Washington, and the century would be renowned.

No band on 21st-century radio has mined pre-grunge hair-metal's sleaze like L.A.'s Buckcherry. So it makes poetic sense that they'd spend their sixth album tallying all seven deadly sins.

The Internet is the crime scene of the 21st Century.

Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

Stayed up and watched a little spanktrovision. It's the American way. There's really nothing wrong with spanktrovision. One of the best inventions of the 1900s, 20th century.

They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.

Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared as biological understanding accumulated over the last century.

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

One of the strange phenomena of the last century is the spectacle of religion dropping the appeal of fear while other human interests have picked it up.

The most exciting thing about women's liberation is that this century will be able to take advantage of talent and potential genius that have been wasted because of taboos.

We've got to have a legacy of leadership. We've got to bring along with us a generation of black women who are going to confront twenty-first-century realities.

You know, since the 6th century, Sunni and Shia have been fighting.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

While it is a cause for regret that Fischer did not continue to produce scintillating games, he perhaps had a greater impact on chess than any other twentieth century player

There is no - let me repeat - no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.

I believe that we have the first genius of the 21st century, Leo Messi.

Here's the new art of the twenty-first century: the art of curating, the art of plucking all the good stuff from a superabundance of crap.

Not being able to address the attribution of change in the early 20th century to my mind precludes any highly confident attribution of change in the late 20th century.

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

Meditation should be the foremost technology of the 21st century; the technology of reprogramming the non-spatial universal computer.

Over the course of the last quarter century I've learned a lot. And the main thing I've learned is that we're better together and that our society needs inclusion - right? - not exclusion.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

The Government's mission is to build a strong and fair Australia capable of meeting the new challenges of the 21st century.

When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

I sincerely believe what happens in India has, I think, lessons, morals for the future evolution of humankind in the 21st century.

Custom is petrification, nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.

It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.