Twentieth Century Quotes - Page 7

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

Michael Pollan

Sweet, Wind, Apples

Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.44, Random House

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Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams.

Arthur Compton

Dream, Adventure, Joy

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The twentieth century provides little or no evidence in any corner of the globe to support the contention that religion causes most human conflict.

Michael Medved

Support, Religion, Littles

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It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Beautiful, Strong, Mean

"The Souls of Black Folk". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903.

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The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the begining. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war.

Stanislaw Lem

War, Understanding, Enemy

Stanislaw Lem (2002). “Peace on Earth”, p.59, HMH

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Like twentieth-century Iran, the remnant of the Persian Empire, Ethiopia under Haile Selassie attempted to preserve the absolutist state throught an accommodation with modernizing forces in his own terms without completely subduing traditionalists. This was not a strategy of Haile Selassie's own choosing. Instead, he was overtaken by events and forced to deal with contradictions that were from the very beginning too formidable to be managed in the long term.

Haile Selassie

Iran, Long, Events

"Revolutionary Ethiopia : From Empire to People's Republi" by Edmond J. Keller, Indiana University Press, (p. 67), 1991.

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The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

David Blankenhorn

Children, School, Men

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The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Philosophy, Reality, Views

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The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.

Louise Bourgeois

Lonely, Loneliness, Artist

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We believe that there is one economic lesson which our twentieth century experience has demonstrated conclusively-that America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business.... the two are interdependent. You cannot strengthen one by weakening the other, and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the legs of a giant.

Benjamin Franklin Fairless

Business, Believe, Cutting

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... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.

Gertrude Stein

Real, Different, Use

Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.52, Random House

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The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.

Gertrude Stein

Nature, Events, Century

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The use of the word royalty, as fee to a proprietor for the exploitation of a work or property, derives from the period when the sovereign assumed title to all wealth of the realm. It was the struggle for freedom from these encroachments of the state that chiefly marked the Nineteenth Century, and established everywhere constitutional regimes of limited authority. In the Twentieth Century, however, we have witnessed a gradual and almost unrestricted movement back to state authoritarianism, primarily in the economic sphere, accompanied by the spread of state monopoly and intervention.

Elgin Groseclose

Struggle, Sovereign, Spheres

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We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.

Robert Neelly Bellah

Race, Special, Essentials

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The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?

Brigid Brophy

Want, Guilty, Century

Brigid Brophy (1969). “In Transit”, Heretic Books

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Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.

Arthur Kroker

Shopping, Space, Desire

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F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

Angela Carter

Reading, Offending, Dubious

Angela Carter (2012). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, p.22, Random House

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[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth century physics.

Abraham Pais

Development, Paper, Physics

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The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.

Albion Woodbury Small

Civilized Nations, Aberration, Problem

1914 'A Vision of Social Efficiency', in the American Journal of Sociology, Jan.

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The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.

Rheta Childe Dorr

Jobs, Men, Wages

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The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy.

Gary Zukav

Philosophy, Reality, Development

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It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine-the imago dei-image of God, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love's bombardment

Huston Smith

Energy, Atoms, Sun

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Worldwide, the twentieth century has seen the rise of extraordinary concentrations of economic and political power - evoking the people as the source of power while simultaneously privatizing its most meaningful exercise. Democracy always seems to be at least slightly elusive under such conditions.

Thomas L. Dumm

Meaningful, Exercise, People

Interview with Jill Stauffer, staging.believermag.com. January 2009.

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Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors.

Faye Moskowitz

Parent, Relief, Survivor

Faye Moskowitz (1985). “A Leak in the Heart: Tales from a Woman's Life”, David R Godine Pub

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Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.

Stephen Kinzer

Military, Government, World

Stephen Kinzer (2007). “Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq”, p.3, Macmillan

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