Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 4

• In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

  Charles Petzold

  Memories, Microsoft, Corporations

  Charles Petzold (2000). “Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software”, p.147, Microsoft Press

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• The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Discovery, Land, Radio

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.108, Oxford University Press

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• One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends.

  Caryl Rivers

  Engineering, Political, Great Inventions

  Caryl Rivers (1991). “More joy than rage: crossing generations with the new feminism”, Univ Pr of New England

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• I was like one of those people who is allergic to the twentieth century... I'd been brought up to think there was some order to things, but there was no safety net. Doctors accused me of being mad.

  Peter Wolf

  Health, Thinking, Doctors

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• The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.

  James Joll

  Independence, Example, Spirit

  James Joll (1978). “Antonio Gramsci”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

  George Steiner

  Art, Skills, Degrees

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• By the end of the Twentieth Century, taxation will be reduced to a minimum, the entire world will be open to trade, and there will be no need of a standing army.

  Erastus Wiman

  Army, Needs, Taxation

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• The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.

  Simone Weil

  Ideas, Firsts, Weakness

  Simone Weil (1977). “The Simone Weil Reader”

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• In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

  Simone Weil

  Men, Evil, Effort

  "On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God". Book by Simone Weil, Translated by R. Rees, "The responsibility of writers," p. 168, 1968.

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• Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

  John Bolton

  Struggle, Mass Destruction, Half

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• In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Bible, Thinking, Vices

  Daniel J. Boorstin (1962). “The Image or What Happened to the American Dream”

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• The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Noble Man, Atrocities Committed

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• Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.

  Eric Hoffer

  Echoes, Events, Half

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

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• There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Song, Pain, Believe

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Starship Troopers”, p.76, Penguin

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• Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.

  Hayden Carruth

  Thinking, Giving, Mind

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• The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Thinking, Race, Political

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• The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.

  John Ortberg

  Country, Race, Worship

  John Ortberg (2010). “Know Doubt: The Importance of Embracing Uncertainty in Your Faith (Large Print 16pt)”, p.126, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.

  Ralph Adams Cram

  Drama, Lasts, Century

  RALPH ADAMS CRAM (1922). “TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE”

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• We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Book, Reading

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• Advertisers regularly con us into believing that we genuinely need one luxury after another. We are convinced that we must keep up with or even go one better than our neighbors. So we buy another dress, sports jacket or sports car and thereby force up the standard of living. The ever more affluent standard of living is the god of twentieth century North America and the adman is its prophet.

  Ronald J. Sider

  Sports, Believe, Luxury

  Ronald J. Sider (1977). “Rich Christians in an age of hunger: a Biblical study”, IVP Books

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• Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

  Neal Stephenson

  Hypocrite, Views, Hypocrisy

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• The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

  Eric Hoffer

  Children, Hate, Men

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Construction Workers, Design

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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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• Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Determination, Long, Giving

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