Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 13

• The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

  Tim Wu

  Blessing, Information, Empires

  Tim Wu (2010). “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, p.160, Vintage

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• It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, World, Cezanne

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• Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ideas, Theory

  "Saltz: MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction Is Illuminating—Although It Shines That Light Mighty Selectively". www.vulture.com. January 6, 2013.

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• They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.

  Douglas Gresham

  Children, Literature, Narnia

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• Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

  Salman Rushdie

  Doubt, Century, Humans

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• On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.

  Carroll Quigley

  New York, Practice, London

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• Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

  Dennis Prager

  People, Evil, Perfect

  FaceBook post by Dennis Prager from May 02, 2012

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• Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

  Benito Mussolini

  Historical, Century, Fascists

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• Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

  Margaret Mead

  Life, Jumping, Firsts

  MARGARET MEAD (1959). “PEOPLE AND PLACES”

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• It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century...He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd.

  Grant Morrison

  Perception, Theatre, May

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• I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

  Bing Crosby

  Music, Country, Thinking

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• The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Color, Racism, Lines

  The Souls of Black Folk ch. 2 (1903)

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• The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Half, Century

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• The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations–great or small–to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Political, Weight, Politics

  "The Bolton Embarrassment" by John Nichols, www.thenation.com. August 1, 2005.

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• It’s notable that the countries that most pride themselves on their commitment to equality, human rights, and democracy (like the United States and the western European countries) are precisely those that, in the late twentieth century, invented a new status (‘illegal’) in order to deprive some of their residents of access to equality, human rights, and democracy.I am honored to lend my name to PICUM’s campaign to end the use of the term ‘illegal’ and to challenge the whole concept of illegality as a status.

  Aviva Chomsky

  Country, Commitment, Pride

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• War was a hellish, horrible hideous thing - too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilised nations.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  War, Century, Horrible

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2015). “Rilla of Ingleside”, p.21, Booklassic

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• The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Community, Forever

  J. G. Ballard (2010). “Super-Cannes: A Novel”, p.269, Macmillan

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• Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

  Arundhati Roy

  Government, People, Mind

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.47, South End Press

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• The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.

  Eric Schlosser

  Struggle, Doubt, Twenties

  Eric Schlosser (2001). “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”, p.261, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

  Stephen King

  Tragedy, Way, Indecisive

  STEPHEN KING (1977). “THE SHINING”

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• My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.

  Nick Hornby

  Fashion, Gay, Hair

  "A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, June 7, 2005.

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• In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century, Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen's daughter. He would no doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape justice by claiming that society's intolerance for bad-tempered, evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.

  Dean Koontz

  Daughter, Queens, Real

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• and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.

  Wendell Berry

  Somewhere Else, People, Community

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• If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Twenties, Firsts, Century

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.6, Penguin

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• Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Running, Men, America

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