Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 17

• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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• A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

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• It is my belief that whereas the twentieth century has been a century of war and untold suffering, the twenty-first century should be one of peace and dialogue. As the continued advances in information technology make our world a truly global village, I believe there will come a time when war and armed conflict will be considered an outdated and obsolete method of settling differences among nations and communities.

  Dalai Lama

  War, Believe, Technology

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• I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record 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

  Christian, Believe, Civilization

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• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

  John Lahr

  Spiritual, White, America

  "Hard Sell" by John Lahr, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

  Laurie Garrett

  Age, Care, Disease

  Laurie Garrett (2003). “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health”, p.9

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• The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

  Gertrude Stein

  Science, Doe, Literature

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.66, Random House

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• This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Hate, Fall

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• The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.

  Richard Heinberg

  Competition, Environmental, Energy

  Richard Heinberg (2003). “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”, New Society Pub

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• I played ten injury-free years between the ages of 12 and 22. Then, suddenly, it seemed like I was allergic to the twentieth century.

  Nigel Melville

  Years, Age, Rugby

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• History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight.

  Neil Armstrong

  Future, Space Flight, Technological Development

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• One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Truth, Believe, Peculiar

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Christopher Ralling (1967). “Muggeridge through the microphone: B.B.C. radio and television”, Not Avail

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• The twentieth century saw the emergence of a Churchless Mission and a Missionless Church

  Eddie Gibbs

  Church, Saws, Century

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• Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable.

  Jean Gebser

  Reality, Justice, Understanding

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• Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

  Jack Vance

  Book, Fairy Tale, Century

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• The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.

  Harold Innis

  Religious, War, Communication

  Harold Innis (1999). “The Bias of Communication”, p.67, University of Toronto Press

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• As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

  Joel Bakan

  Government, People, Needs

  Joel Bakan (2005). “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike.

  Jeffrey K. Zeig

  Reading, Men, Pioneers

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• It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

  Allen Newell

  Plato, Taught Us, Space

  "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search". Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (p. 125), March 1976.

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