Century Quotes

We will build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge. We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors.

Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.

The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress.

As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world - and I can assure you more are on the way.

As a matter of fact, it's in our interests that we help reformers across the Middle East achieve their objectives. This is the fundamental challenge of the 21st century.

That's really the fundamental question we face here in the beginning of this 21st century is whether or not we believe as a nation and others believe it is possible to defeat this ideology.

Our law enforcement must have every tool necessary to find and disrupt terrorists at home and abroad. That's the task of the 21st century.

An all-volunteer army is best suited to fight the new wars of the 21st century.

I have been the creative literary mind of the century.

Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century.

I don't know if I change my act from century to century. Sometimes I'm onstage doing imitations and references to people who have been dead for 50 years.

It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky.

America is old tobacco: gold and green. It's lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.

Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

People will believe absurd things - in the 19th century and now.

some bosses are so greedy (for themselves only) they forget underlings are not thirteenth-century peasants who can be satisfied with a glass of mead and three festivals a year.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.

The wisdom of our actions in the first three years of peace will determine the course of world history for half a century.

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

I delight to come to my bearings,... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sitthoughtfully while it goes by.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

The reality is that we are going to have problems with water in this century. And the fact that we are going to have problems with fossil fuel is a given.

It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.

Jazz has been the voice of freedom for so many countries over the past half century.

Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.

From the theft of confidential cables to 21st century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.

Like the railroads that brought us together in the 19th century, these trails will bring us together in the 20th and 21st centuries. (at launch of the National Millennium Trails Program, 1999)

I think a revolution transitioning from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy - somebody's going to be the 21st-century clean-energy superpower.

Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.

I love stories that give me a perspective on how easy American life has become in the 21st century.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.

The ingredients that made this country, you know, the miracle of the world - I mean we had a seven for one improvement in the average American standard of living in the 20th century.

It’s foolish to talk of an “Asian century” or an “emerging market century” because events move at a pace that renders this degree of durability obsolete.

The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century - glossy, brash, and insecure.