Century Quotes - Page 10

• You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries.

  Garrett Fort

  Men, Murder, Five

  "Fictional character: Prof. Von Helsing". "Dracula's Daughter", 1936.

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• If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress-which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.

  Robert Wright

  Change, Strong, War

  Robert Wright (2001). “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny”, p.314, Vintage

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• The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

  Neil Postman

  Spiritual, Technology, Brain

  Neil Postman (2011). “The Disappearance of Childhood”, p.146, Vintage

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• The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.

  Neil Postman

  Photography, Space, Humanity

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• There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

  Giacomo Leopardi

  Art, Discipline, Remakes

  Giacomo Leopardi (1987). “Leopardi: Poems and Prose”, Praeger Pub Text

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• Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

  Roland Barthes

  Keys, Class, Bourgeoisie

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• Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

  John Cage

  Music, Fighting, Hands

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• Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

  Lillian Hellman

  Russia, Class, America

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• The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

  Lewis Mumford

  Moon, Men, Discipline

  Lewis Mumford (2016). “The Culture of Cities”, p.372, Open Road Media

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• No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Mother, Children, America

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Fashion, Art

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• There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Men, Dust

  Umberto Eco (2003). “Baudolino”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

  Calvin Trillin

  Hands, My Family, Clean

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• In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

  Lynne Truss

  Home, People, Gone

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• A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.

  William Winwood Reade

  God, Olympus, Nile

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.537

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• It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

  Hannah Arendt

  Government, Opponents, Dramatic

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.206, Penguin

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• It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

  Martin Amis

  Fashion, Thinking, Half

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• A relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Country, Past, Europe

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• Before we become too arrogant with the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, the sin of pride, let us remember that the two great wars of this century, wars which cost twenty million dead, were fought between Christian nations praying to the same God.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Christian, War, Pride

  Nixon, Richard M. (1974). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972”, p.126, Best Books on

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• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

  John Lahr

  Spiritual, White, America

  "Hard Sell" by John Lahr, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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• How marvelous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men's hands; cemented with men's honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human -- for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.

  Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

  Angel, Past, Men

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• I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Book, Black History, Process

  "Patt Morrison Asks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - still hooked". articles.latimes.com. March 24, 2012.

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• Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

  Douglas Coupland

  Past, Ideas, Two

  Douglas Coupland (2008). “JPod”, p.12, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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