Century Quotes - page 94
The World Game is a precisely defined design science process for arriving at economic, technological and social insights pertinent to humanity's future involvement aboard our planet Earth. The processes consist of mathematical procedures not only as incisive and complex as those involved in celestial navigation, or astro-ballistics, or the space program, but even more so-for, in addition to all the variables common to those sciences and The World Game, the latter involves also all the variables governing the planning of the programs of the industrialization of both Russia and China....The World Game is seven times more complex than China's quarter century industrialization and thirty-five times more complex than was Russia's industrialization problem. The World Game must find the specific means of making five billion humans a total economic and physical success at the earliest possible moment without anyone being advantaged at the expense of another.
Buckminster Fuller
We prisoners of war came home to a country that had lost a war and the best sense of itself, a country beset by social and economic problems. Assassinations, riots, scandals, contempt for political, religious, and educational institutions gave the appearance that we had become a dysfunctional society. Patriotism was sneered at, the military scorned. The world anticipated the collapse of our global influence. The great, robust, confident Republic that had given its name to the last century seemed exhausted. Ronald Reagan believed differently. He possessed an unshakable faith in America's greatness, past and future, that proved more durable than the prevailing political sentiments of the time. His confidence was a tonic to men who had come home eager to put the war behind us and for the country to do likewise.
John McCain
She uses pastel with the freedom and charm that Rosalba Carriera first brought to the medium in the eighteenth century.. .Here is a delicate colorist who succeeds in making everything cohere into an overall harmony of shades of white which it is difficult to orchestrate without lapsing into sentimentality.
Berthe Morisot
It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived - especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars - not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
John Updike
The 20th century was perhaps the deadliest in human history, devastated by innumerable conflicts, untold suffering, and unimaginable crimes.Time after time, a group or a nation inflicted extreme violence on another, often driven by irrational hatred and suspicion, or unbounded arrogance and thirst for power and resources. In response to these cataclysms, the leaders of the world came together at mid-century to unite the nations as never before.
A forum was created - the United Nations - where all nations could join forces to affirm the dignity and worth of every person, and to secure peace and development for all peoples. Here States could unite to strengthen the rule of law, recognize and address the needs of the poor, restrain man's brutality and greed, conserve the resources and beauty of nature, sustain the equal rights of men and women, and provide for the safety of future generations.
Kofi Annan
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies - linguistics and mythology - but certainly not to everything.
The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I happen to think that Callas was the greatest singer of the 20th century. I feel that so many people have learned the wrong things from her, rather than the right things. She was a fabulous musician. When you listened to her, you could almost take dictation. All the dots were there. Anything that was wrong was because of the deterioration of the instrument over time. But usually musical things were not wrong. She has pitch problems and wobbles that came in later.
Maria Callas
So I approach the date on which my story of the Fifty Years Revolution begins. The old world ended, with its strange mixture of beauty and ugliness, happiness and sorrow, good and evil-so much to be proud of; so much, looking back, of which perhaps to be ashamed. Yet the most rabid radical or the most caustic critic of the Britain that had fought and won a twenty-year battle for freedom a century before, that for a hundred years had helped to keep the peace of the world, and spread civilisation to its distant corners, cannot but feel that if, in this sequence of rapid change, much has been gained, something, too, has been lost.
Harold Macmillan
It is no doubt true that you cannot "draw an indictment against a whole people". Yet the story of Prussian policy through many generations is dark indeed. "Prussia's whole policy", declared Metternich, "consisted in the enlargement of her territory and the extension of her influence; to attain it, she was willing to adopt any manner of means and pass over the law of nations and the universal principles of morality." What Frederick the Great began was followed by his successors at the end of the century, and continued by Bismarck. It inspired the Kaiser and his advisers in 1914. It was soon to be surpassed in cynicism and crime by Hitler.
Harold Macmillan
The colonial past has never been discussed in a transparent and systematic manner in Belgium. Many historians have certainly studied the subject, but at the political level the theme has been very little addressed, if not avoided. And the biggest gap is in education. Our 21st century multicultural society needs to know the facts, not the myths passed down from generation to generation. The detachment of the statues of Leopold II is part of a desire to purge a past partisan by the settlers, without regard for the colonized population and their suffering.
Leopold II of Belgium
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity.
Henry David Thoreau
No-one who knows Hayek's work can doubt that his attempt to restate liberal principles in a form appropriate to the circumstances and temper of the twentieth century has yielded a body of insights wholly comparable in profundity and power with those of his forebears in the classical liberal tradition.
Friedrich Hayek
Hayek should be taken seriously because he has correctly identified as the most serious problems confronting civilization in the twentieth century the problems of nationalism and totalitarianism. Even with the dereliction of European communism at the end of the twentieth century, the problems which remain or are reemerging in the shape of ethnic conflict, separatist national movements, and regional trading blocs stem from practices and ideas which the liberal tradition has consistently criticized: ideas hostile to individualist, universalist, and egalitarian moral principles. While thinkers like Hannah Arendt have also recognized the threat and moral danger posed by totalitarianism, it is in Hayek's work that we have the most thorough attempt to understand the logic of its institutional alternative.
Friedrich Hayek
