Century Quotes - Page 34

• It is easy to be mindless in America, because dreaming of and living for a better tomorrow is the American way. ... The problem is, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have gotten so good at living for tomorrow that most of us spend very little time in the present.

  Barbara De Angelis

  Dream, America, Live In The Moment

  Barbara De Angelis (1997). “Are You the One for Me? ; Real Moments”, Fine Communications

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• From the foot of the pyramids I contemplate twenty centuries, buried in the sand. ... I came here to hold on to fleeting life, and I see all about me only death. ... I write this, not quite knowing what I'm saying, but I dry the ink with the dust of Egyptian queens.

  Rachel

  Queens, Writing, Dust

  4 Copy quote

• Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Hymns, America

  6 Copy quote

• A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.

  Olive Schreiner

  Use, May

  Olive Schreiner (1924). “The letters of Olive Schreiner, 1876-1920”, Hyperion Pr

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience ought to have taught us has been learned.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Taught Us, World, Lessons

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Religious, Void, Belief

  Shirley Hazzard (1991). “Countenance of truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim case”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century.

  Phyllis Schlafly

  Claims, Fraud, Downtrodden

  Phyllis Schlafly (2003). “Feminist fantasies”, Spence Pub

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.

  Eva Figes

  Reality, Wish, Prejudice

  6 Copy quote

• I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Civilization, Doubt, Moral

  7 Copy quote

• Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach. But he will need something more. He will need to overcome his disgust long enough to ponder the roots of this strange and puzzling phenomenon.

  Mark Lilla

  Strong, Writing, Europe

  4 Copy quote

• Despite the modern dogma to the effect that women were a subject sex until the nineteenth century 'emancipated' them from history, women in history had demonstrated strong wills and purposes, had made assertions, and had directed or influenced all human destiny, including their own, since human life began.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Strong, Sex, Women

  7 Copy quote

• The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men ... [but] The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Men, Race, History

  Mary Ritter Beard, Nancy F. Cott (1991). “A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters”, p.19, Yale University Press

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The woman's bill of rights is, unhappily, long overdue. It should have run along with the rights of man in the eighteenth century. Its drag as to time of official proclamation is a drag as to social vision. And even if equal rights were now written into the law of our land, it would be so inadequate today as a means to food, clothing and shelter for woman at large that what they would still be enjoying would be equality in disaster rather than in realistic privilege.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Running, Mean, Men

  4 Copy quote

• To ignore [the] great social facts -- political facts, if you please -- and over-emphasize the old moral responsibility of the 'domestic' mother is a hollow mockery and betrays a hopeless ignorance of industrial and urban conditions in the Twentieth Century. ... Everything that counts in the common life is political.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Mother, Ignorance, Responsibility

  4 Copy quote

• Much as being active in the antislavery movement of the last century involved more than not engaging in slavery oneself, so joining in an antiviolence movement has to go beyond opting for nonviolence in one's personal life. It calls for engaging in imaginative and forceful practices of nonviolent resistance to violence, including taking a stand toward entertainment violence.

  Sissela Bok

  Joining In, Practice, Movement

  4 Copy quote

• I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

  Rosanne Cash

  Music, Dream, Song

  Rosanne Cash (2010). “Composed: A Memoir”, p.8, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

  Paul Theroux

  Mysterious, Scholarship, Enjoyed

  4 Copy quote

• 20th century poetry is a piñata. Images break from the earth when the poet strikes it.

  Diane Glancy

  Poetry, Earth, Break

  4 Copy quote

• The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns. There had been love and peace for some time on the continent of Africa because for all this time black men had been captivated by the doctrines of Christianity. It took them centuries to realize its contradictions. ... perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ.

  Bessie Head

  Jesus, Lying, Philosophy

  27 Copy quote

• Women if you want to realise yourselves - you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval - all your pet illusions must be unmasked - the lies of centuries have got to go - are you prepared for the Wrench?

  Mina Loy

  Lying, Pet, Upheaval

  10 Copy quote

• The twentieth century belongs to Canada.

  Wilfrid Laurier

  Canada, Twentieth Century

  9 Copy quote

• In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

  John Henrik Clarke

  Views, Years, People

  14 Copy quote

• Some crafts have been practiced for centuries. These crafts were created using skills passed from generation to generation, and were motivated by necessity such as baskets and pottery, or artistic expression, such as more baskets and more pottery. Today, there is a much more leisurely attitude toward crafting, and virtually anyone without a job and access to pipe cleaners can join the elite society of crafters.

  Amy Sedaris

  Jobs, Attitude, Skills

  4 Copy quote

• I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Father, Thinking, Sprung Up

  5 Copy quote

• Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Jobs, Passion, Earth

  "The Poet and the World". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1996.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source