Century Quotes - Page 17

• Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food.

  Lord Acton

  Strong, Ignorance, Men

  "The History of Freedom in Antiquity". Lord Acton's opening statement of his speech on February 28, 1877; later quoted in "The History of Freedom and Other Essays" edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, 1907.

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• Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.

  Bill Moyers

  Father, Mean, Responsibility

  "For America's Sake". Speech on December 12, 2006. "Moyers on Democracy". Book by Bill D. Moyers, p. 17, 2008.

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• It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

  Alain de Botton

  Taken, Has Beens

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

  Alain de Botton

  Reality, Odds, Play

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

  Alain de Botton

  Greek, Rewards, Leisure

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.

  Laura Riding

  Writing, Mean, Practice

  "A Survey of Modernist Poetry". Book by Laura Riding, 1927.

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• The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies.

  Kevin Spacey

  Motivation, Media, Play

  Speech at the Old Vic, Summer 2011.

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

  Hillary Clinton

  Class, America, Lasts

  Hillary Clinton's economic policy speech, May 29, 2007.

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• For a century, the Arabs tribes gave Islam the first of these victories. Then the rough mountain peoples of North Africa, the Berbers, helped it to conquer Spain and organize Fatimid Egypt.

  Fernand Braudel

  Egypt, Victory, Islam

  Fernand Braudel (1995). “A History of Civilizations”, Penguin Group USA

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• Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it).

  George Gershwin

  Song, New York, Essence

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• Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

  Louis Dudek

  People, Mind, Rubbish

  Collected in Notebooks 1960-1994 (1994).

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• The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything.

  Louis Dudek

  Wonderful, Capacity, Seeing

  Collected in Notebooks 1960-1994 (1994).

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• The original Jethro Tull was a 19th century English agriculturist who invented a seed drill you see. The first automatic process where by small holes were made in Mother Earth and even smaller seeds were deposited one at a time and neatly covered over as a cat does after having being naughty.

  Ian Anderson

  Mother, Cat, Naughty

  Interview with Gary Hyde, August 12, 1974.

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• Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Artist, Grace, Delicacy

  "Renoir: His Life and Work". Book by François Fosca, p. 175, 1975.

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• After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on.

  Hermann Goring

  California, Expansion, United States

  At lunch during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, December 11, 1945. "Nuremberg Diary" by Gustave Gilbert, p. 66, 1947.

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• Not only did she [Marilyn Monroe] master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century.

  Gail Levin

  Photography, Masters, Subjects

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I hope we have learned throughout centuries of revolution and reaction that it's really a shift in consciousness that we need. And I think there is a shift in consciousness among our human species. I think the human species is evolving, spiritually.

  Elizabeth Lesser

  Thinking, Needs, Revolution

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• The legacy of [Martin Luther] King is the very thing that must be expanded if America is to be free and democratic in the 21st century. It's just as simple as that.

  Cornel West

  Kings, Simple, America

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.

  James Elkins

  Emotional, Artist, Important

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• Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

  James Elkins

  Moving, Giving, Looks

  "Are Artists Bored by Their Work?" by James Elkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 15, 2010.

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• For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries.

  Audrey Flack

  Art, Reality, Data

  Audrey Flack, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Hills, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery (1992). “Breaking the rules: Audrey Flack, a retrospective 1950-1990”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete.

  Philip Pearlstein

  Photography, Art, Reading

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• In the 21st century, culture is power.

  Park Geun-hye

  Culture, 21st Century

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• In the 18th century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners independently.

  Jardine Libaire

  Ideas, People, Fundamentals

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• In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting.

  Kevin Warwick

  Believe, Home, Numbers

  "Computer Simulating 13-year-old Boy Becomes First to Pass Turing Test". www.reading.ac.uk. June 09, 2014.

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