Century Quotes - Page 20

• Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

  Fred Hoyle

  Stars, Achievement, Scales

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• Henceforward the Christian Churches having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, came into the hands of the Encratites: and the Heathens, who in the fourth century came over in great numbers to the Christians, embraced more readily this sort of Christianity, as having a greater affinity with their old superstitions, than that of the sincere Christians; who by the lamps of the seven Churches of Asia, and not by the lamps of the Monasteries, had illuminated the Church Catholic during the three first centuries.

  Isaac Newton

  Christian, Numbers, Hands

  Isaac Newton “Observations”, Lulu.com

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• We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.

  Albert J. Nock

  Government, Organization, Two

  "Our Enemy, the State" by Albert J. Nock, (p. 38), 1935.

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Unique, Fleeting, Shapes

  Nixon, Richard M. (1971). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969”, p.1, Best Books on

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• I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught:;... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State.

  Enoch Powell

  Taken, Europe, Doctrine

  The Daily Telegraph (9 June 1975), from "Enoch Powell on 1992", p. 144, 1989.

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• I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Morning, War, Insane

  Muriel Rukeyser, Kate Daniels (1992). “Out of silence: selected poems”, Triquarterly Books

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• Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission--it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Writing, America, Twenties

  Fareed Zakaria (2009). “The Post-American World: And The Rise Of The Rest”, p.68, Penguin UK

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• The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Two, Democracy, Deregulation

  Fareed Zakaria (2007). “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (Revised Edition)”, p.239, W. W. Norton & Company

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• As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Country, Recovery, Past

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• [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Simple, Self, Ambitious

  "Science in History". Book by John Desmond Bernal, Volume 2, 1954.

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• In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Years, Enhancement, Towns

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.96, Penguin

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• My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions.

  Fritjof Capra

  Views, Ideas, Our World

  "The Turning Point". Book by Fritjof Capra, www.juwing.sp.ru. 1982.

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• Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

  John Lahr

  Coward, Momentum, Exhilaration

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• There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Reality, Civilization

  Helmut Friedel, Tina Dickey, Hans Hofmann, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München (1998). “Hans Hofmann: Wunder Des Rhythmus und Schönheit Des Raumes : [exhibition at the Städtische Galerie Im Lenbachaus in Munich, from 23 April to 29 June 1997, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, from 12 September to 2 November 1997 ]”, p.97, Hudson Hills

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• In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

  Theodor Adorno

  Dream, Vegetables, Outcomes

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

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• On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).

  Gustave Courbet

  Funeral, Meditation, Criticism

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• The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

  Alan Bennett

  Running, School, Class

  1968 Forty Years On (published 1969), act 2. Snobbery With Violence was used as a book title by Colin Wilson (1971).

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• The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

  Northrop Frye

  Intelligent, Men, People

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham (2004). “Northrop Frye unbuttoned: wit and wisdom from the notebooks and diaries”, Gnomon Distribution

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• They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Men, Hands, Perfect

  "The Journal of Eugene Delacroix : A Selection". Book edited by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p. 256, 1980.

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• We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Believe, Intelligent, Track

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.312, 1980.

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• Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

  Anthony Trollope

  Towers, Quarters, Novel

  Anthony Trollope (2016). “Anthony Trollope: The Chronicles of Barsetshire & The Palliser Novels (Unabridged): The Warden + The Barchester Towers + Doctor Thorne + Framley Parsonage + The Small House at Allington + The Last Chronicle of Barset + Can You Forgive Her? + The Prime Minister + Eustace Diamonds...”, p.58, e-artnow (Open Publishing)

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• Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Inspiration, Europe, Civilization

  "Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom" also known as "Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism" by Mikhail Bakunin, September 1867.

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• When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

  Rollo May

  Reading, Emotional, Profound

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

  Rollo May

  Practice, People, May

  Rollo May Ph.D. (1953). “Man's Search for Himself”

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