Century Quotes - Page 36

• My father urged Alan [Lomax] not to repeat the mistakes of the European folklorists who, a century ago, had collected these peasant songs and then arranged them for part choir and accompanied them on piano, and then told the young people of their country, "Don't change a note, this is our sacred heritage." Father said, whether it's a fiddle tune or a gospel song, learn it right off the record from the people who grew up with it. Don't just learn it from a piece of paper.

  Pete Seeger

  Country, Song, Father

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.

  Pete Seeger

  Song, Father, Use

  Source: www.wholeearth.com

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• I feel like we [americans] are a unique nation in this world, in that we are able to implement great change in our society over a relatively short period of time. What takes centuries in Europe, we accomplish in a generation.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Unique, Europe, World

  "Barnes & Noble interview with Khaled Hosseini". Interview with James Mustich, www.csmonitor.com. November 24, 2008.

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• Throughout the last century there were multiple attempts at giving Afghan women more autonomy, to change marriage laws, to abolish the practice of bride price and child marriage, and to enforce women to be involved in school. Every time, the reaction from the traditionalists was one of contempt and scorn and at times outright rebellion. I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Children, School, Thinking

  "Khaled Hosseini, Kabul’s Splendid Son" by Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May/June 2009.

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• In the previous days and times, we've been involved, not exclusively, but largely, in the process of individual survival: How do I get through the day, how do I get through the week, how do I get through the month? In the 21st century, we're learning that we can no longer concentrate on individual survival strategies, that unless we begin to coalesce those strategies and learn how we can survive collectively, that no individual is going to survive in the long run.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Running, Long, Survival

  Source: www.kabbalah.info

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• I think we need to find a way to provide people with a reason that the average man on the street can grasp and embrace, that would cause him to move away from the centuries-old idea of the individual and individualism, and move toward a different concept of what it means to be human in a collective society. Unless he has that reason, unless he has a fundamental reason to do that, it's going to be very difficult to cause him to make that shift, in my view.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Moving, Mean, Men

  Source: www.kabbalah.info

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• The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.

  Margaret Atwood

  Running, Cutting, Issues

  "Margaret Atwood Interview". Interview with Matthew Rothschild, progressive.org. December 2, 2010.

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• We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

  Gore Vidal

  War, Army, Practice

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.

  Arundhati Roy

  Night, Light, Digital Revolution

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• Well into the 19th century there were pronouncements from just about every branch of science and medicine that reading, writing, and thinking were dangerous for women. Articles in the Lancet declared that women's brains would burst and their uteruses atrophy if they engaged in any form of rigorous thinking. The famous physician J.D. Kellogg insisted that novel reading was the greatest cause of uterine disease among young women and urged parents to protect their daughters from the dreaded consequences of print.

  Dale Spender

  Daughter, Reading, Writing

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• For centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today and which we have often thought of as new.

  Dale Spender

  Today, Has Beens

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• Here is Christianity. Whence came it? It is a force in the world, a prodigious force. It has revolutionized society. It has lifted man out of himself. It has changed the face of the world. There it lies, imbedded in more than eighteen centuries of human history; and history of no mean sort, the best record of the race.

  Herrick Johnson

  Lying, Mean, Men

  Herrick Johnson (1881). “Christianity's Challenge: And Some Phases of Christianity Submitted for Candid Consideration”

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• [T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Pain, Emotion, Insensitivity

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• Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.

  Lawrence M. Friedman

  Sex, Children, Writing

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• First generation Indian immigrants are mass guinea pigs. When a race that subsisted on plants for centuries subsists on a meat-dominated diet, it scares me to know what's in store for them

  Siddharth Katragadda

  Race, Pigs, Scare

  "Dark Rooms: A Saga". Book by Siddharth Katragadda, 2002.

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• Education has a tremendous power on man. Can't we see to which astonishing disciple the people of Sparte have submitted ("s'est plié", Fr.) for centuries, and this with a view to very petty purposes: purely outer greatness, the military predominace of Sparte. This example proves that man can everything on themselves when they want it ("peuvent tout sur eux-mêmes quand ils le veulent", Fr.); therefore it would only be a question of making them will the good.

  African Spir

  Military, Greatness, Men

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 58), 1937.

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• movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion.

  Jennifer Stone

  Movie, Taken, Mood

  Jennifer Stone (1988). “Mind Over Media: Essays on Film and Television”

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• Some ministers preach from notes and some don't. They have argued about it for centuries. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. Two Welsh preachers were on their way to a meeting. One noticed that the other carried written outlines. 'Ah,' he remonstrated, 'you cannot carry fire on paper.' 'True,' replied his companion, 'but you can use paper to start a fire!'

  Vance Havner

  Men, Fire, Two

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• If we remain determined to shape a new and better world of separate, sovereign nations, this new century will be a happier one.

  Alan Caruba

  War, World, Shapes

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• I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

  Bill Nye

  Meaningful, Thinking, Years

  Bill Nye (2014). “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation”, p.39, St. Martin's Press

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• I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.

  Tim Gunn

  Fashion, Teaching, Discipline

  "In Which Tim Gunn Tells Men to Watch 'Project Runway'" by Kurt Soller, www.esquire.com. July 26, 2011.

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• I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

  Penelope Wilton

  Close Relationship, Twentieth Century

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• Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mind, Age, Illusion

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.160, Harvard University Press

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• Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

  Bill Vaughan

  Fashion, Book, Years

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