Century Quotations

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

It's embarrassing that we're in the 21st century and we don't even know what makes gravity work. I'm getting older and thinking maybe I should tackle more than the mundane. I may fail, but at least I will have tried.

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

I'm from Port Arthur, Texas! Little guy! Little character guy from one of the saddest oil-refinery towns in America. And here I was driving over to Beverly Hills, to 20th Century Fox, to be on 'M*A*S*H!'

If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

We know that to compete for the jobs of the 21st century and thrive in a global economy, we need a growing, skilled and educated workforce, particularly in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Americans with bachelor's degrees have half the unemployment rate of those with a high school degree.

As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

We know that a smarter Australia means a stronger Australia. An Australia able to grasp the opportunities of the Asian Century. A skilled workforce and a strong, productive and resilient economy. We know we'll only win the economic race in the Asian Century if we win the education race.

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

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

Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.

If you stop and think about our history, one of the reasons we had an American century and there is an American dream was because at key points in our history we made very bold decisions about making sure that there was very broad, universal access to quality education.

After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

I turned to the novel, an artistic form which had in former days been neglected and had thus acquired a bad reputation, but which during the nineteenth century had developed and elevated itself to the ranks occupied by drama and the ancient epic.

A few years back I was asked if I would go and meet a director and his various acolytes, and it occurred to me halfway through the meeting that what I was doing was auditioning. And I thought, 'Well, hang on buddy. I've done half a century of this.'

I was born on April 1, 1933, in Constantine, Algeria, which was then part of France. My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition.

What we have seen in financial markets should bring home to us all that the central organising principle of this 21st century is interdependence. For the century just past, interdependence may have been one option among many. For the century that is to come, there is no longer an alternative.

Sometimes you just stumble into something that works, and here I am a quarter of a century later.

The role of an orchestra in the 21st century isn't just playing, it's about developing future audiences and performers.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

'Indian policy' has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.

I got bored with the topic; I felt this was 19th century physics. I was wondering if there was still something profound that could be made with light microscopy. So I saw that the diffraction barrier was the only important problem that had been left over.

Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study them.

The 20th century has been marked by cynicism, selfishness, greed, and the desire to please, all without changing the status quo. In the 21st century, we must resurrect solidarity and compassion.

At American Airlines, we have built a business around the love of travel that has lasted three quarters of a century. And I'm pretty sure we're just getting started.

There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

I shall confess at the outset that it was only shortly after the beginning of this century that I entered active life - with a somewhat precocious capacity for involvement.

I'm happy and I'm focused on my work... it's incredible to be able to work with 20th Century Fox and to keep opening doors for Mexicans and Latins in the United States.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

In the 21st century when few of us stay in the same job all our lives, I would like to think there was flexibility so teachers could become social workers, or foster carers become teachers.

We said in our 21st Century Party paper there are 61 mosaic groups, which the market research people use as different socio-economic categories and half of our members come from just five of those groups and that is very narrow - too narrow.

The rise of China as a new power is another great challenge for the US. Our failure to properly handle Germany and Japan earlier in the 20th century cost us and the world dearly. We must not make this same mistake with China.

The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's?

You have indeed done much since the new century began to give shape and substance to the growing, the insistent desire that war may be banished from the earth.

I believe that the organisers of this conference have chosen a very timely subject for our discussion - because the 21st century will confront us with an entirely new set of challenges.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism

My dad had an aunt at the turn of the century who died from diabetes, but she was the closest affected relative in my family.

You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe - pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man.

Australia has an economic interest in ensuring our cities have 21st century urban rail transport to reduce traffic congestion.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice! That's the condition of the female. Women have been conditioned to sacrifice for centuries.

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

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

Anyone who was alive during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14th century experienced something terrifyingly close to the widespread death and chaos of an apocalyptic event.

Last century we needed lawyers; this century we need big, broad coalitions. When extremists decide to attack all our communities, they must hope that there will be infighting. But we have stood all for one and one for all. That is how we will win.

Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.

There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.

It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

I'm very happy in my 18th century worker's cottage in Kent and playing my music for the dog-walkers paused outside.

You can't be a first-world economy in the 21st century if you're not on the path to a clean energy future.

To some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business.

I understand the power of the internet, but I can't say that I'm there. I'm old-fashioned and living in a different century. I don't know. I just don't really understand the craze of it.

We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics.

Radical Islam has been the foe of Christendom for centuries.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely.

In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.

There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I've often thought, 'Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape - absolutely beautiful.'

As a former Apollo astronaut, I think it's safe to say that SpaceX and the other commercial developers embody the 21st century version of the Apollo frontier spirit.

All generations of teens have it hard, I think. Each society and century has its struggles that the others can't compare to.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.

The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there.

Globalisation means many things. At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world - it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.

The Internet in the 21st Century is as important to our future as highways were in the 20th Century. Like a highway, the Internet must remain free and open for all - not determined by the highest bidders.

Our culture is hung up on and overemphasises what can be derived from material objects. I think this is something quite new, over the past 200 or 300 years - that life has become about accumulating material wealth. The 21st century is not about accumulating material wealth like the 20th century. It's already eroding.

Like probably a lot of people, I came away from watching films like 'Miss Representation' and 'Half the Sky' with the realization that the battle for women's rights is not over, especially not globally, and that the moral imperative of our century is to achieve full rights for everyone regardless of gender.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.

I am a person of the 18th century.

The bigger question is how does a rogue species called humans - whose population just blew through the seven billion mark on it's way to nine billion members - manage to survive the next century on a planet with finite resources, without destroying its delicate balance in the process.

I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.

And the annual meetings of the League's Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.

Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world.

Just as it had taken centuries to determine the true nature of the universe, so also the search for the beginning of human life proceeded well into the 20th century.

I've always been in love with the movies. They're the dreams of the 20th Century.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth

The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

In the third century after Christ the faith continued to spread.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.

People have asked me about the 19th century and how I knew so much about it. And the fact is I really grew up in the 19th century, because North Carolina in the 1950s, the early years of my childhood, was exactly synchronous with North Carolina in the 1850s. And I used every scrap of knowledge that I had.

Conservatives and liberals alike have been waiting for this moment for a third of a century.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.

Oh my goodness, they are rocking so many variations of my high-top fade. I mean, Rihanna has taken it to a very angular 21st Century thing. Miss Fantasia has it in a very seductive, you know, up-flip, and it's just lovely, right? Oh, I think it's wonderful.