Twentieth Century Quotes

• By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Birthday, Men, Age

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.39, Princeton University Press

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• You don't have to get it right the first time.

  Barbara Sher

  Time, Firsts, Action

  Barbara Sher (2010). “I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It”, p.177, Dell

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• We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

  John Lennon

  Music, Our Generation, Nwo

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• We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.

  John F. Kennedy

  Inspirational, Today, 1960s

  Speech accepting Democratic presidential nomination, Los Angeles, Cal., 15 July 1960.

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• We stand today on the edge of a new frontier - the frontier of the 1960's - a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils - a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.

  John F. Kennedy

  Opportunity, Today, Peril

  Speech accepting Democratic nomination in Los Angeles, 15 July 1960, in Vital Speeches 1 Aug. 1960, p. 611

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• We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Money, Doctrine, Littles

  The Guardian, November 20, 1991.

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• Life is like a parachute jump, you've got to get it right the first time.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Motivational, Life Is Like, Firsts

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• Of course, if there should be war, it wouldn't last long - not in the twentieth century; and no one wants it. There would be, perhaps, a few skirmishes on the frontiers, and then everything would be arranged diplomatically.

  Marie Van Vorst

  War, Long, Would Be

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• The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

  Irving Kristol

  Political, Events, Socialism

  "Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea". Book by Irving Kristol, September 20, 1995.

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• A book that I rate only second in importance in evolution theory to Darwin 's Origin (this as joined with its supplement Of Man), and also rate as undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the twentieth century

  Ronald Fisher

  Book, Men, Evolution

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• [The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.

  Thomas Frank

  Prayer, War, School

  "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Book by Thomas Frank, 2004.

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• Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Men, Primitive Man, Drawing

  Studio International 171, p. 280, June 1966.

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• The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

  Gao Xingjian

  War, Moving, Europe

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• It has been very humbling and gratifying to have these men as our role models. Your generation enabled America to close out the twentieth century as the greatest nation in the history of mankind, the only remaining superpower, the world's leading economy and the world's most respected and feared military force in the world - respected by our friends and allies, feared by our adversaries.

  Eric Shinseki

  Military, Men, America

  "Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States". Book by Bill Yenne, 2007.

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• Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.

  David Ray Griffin

  Memories, Moving, Self

  David Ray Griffin (1989). “God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology”, p.88, SUNY Press

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• Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.

  Mary Norris

  Taken, Light, Race

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• In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Men, Nuclear, Neutrons

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “V.”, p.187, Penguin

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• I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world.

  Naz?m Hikmet

  Children, Fighting, World

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

  Louis Dudek

  Wonderful, Century, Capacity

  Collected in Notebooks 1960-1994 (1994).

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• For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

  Margaret Mead

  Reflection, Ideas, Political

  "Continuities in Cultural Evolution". Book by Margaret Mead, 1964.

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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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• 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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• Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

  Marcel Proust

  Novelists, Proust, Century

  Marcel Proust (1999). “The captive & the fugitive”

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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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• 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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