Century Quotes - page 96
Traditionally there's this barrier between the people who make movies and the people who watch them, and I think it sucks. Making Hollywood this castle on a hill and crowning actors the "Stars" might have been exciting and even brought people together last century, but now it's grown kind of disgusting in its excesses and it's no longer bringing people together-it's keeping people apart. It always turns my stomach a little when, because I'm in movies and on TV, people sometimes treat me as if I'm somehow different from, even above, a normal person. But the emails, posts, and comments I've been trading recently with people through those aforementioned sites cause me no nausea; they inspire me. There's no nasty status predicated on "Fame" or "Fortune." There's just that beautiful thing, the point of all art in the first place: a connection between one individual and another.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
To explain the popularity of the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th century, most of them say it was a deliberate British concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule- policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow citing, from the copious archives which the British administration in India has left behind, any kind of positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would base his assertions, especially in such controversial questions.
Koenraad Elst
Father Hermanns is particularly angry with a publication titled The Adivasis - So-Called by G.S. Ghurye, the great social scientist who had mapped the nasal indexes and skull indexes of all the communities in India. Speaking with authority, Ghurye rejects the motivated notion of "adivasi”: as the article's title eloquently says, the so-called adivasis are not more adivasi than the targeted non- adivasis. Nearly all Indians are sons of the soil, and no one in India has any more right to call himself a true native than the next man. The pure race is a myth, a myth that has become frowned upon thanks to Hitler's terrible use of this myth. But in India, inter- ested quarters continue to use this myth of "racial integrity”. Father Hermanns calls it an "aboriginal claim”, though it is in fact a West- ern notion attributed and taught to the tribals by the missionaries, because this myth has been serving them so well for over a century now.
Koenraad Elst
The first part of South Asia to be cleansed of Hinduism was Afghanistan. The 10 th century saw a life-and-death struggle there between Muslim invaders and the local Hindu population and dynasty. In this case, the replacement was not just religious, of Hindus by Muslims, but also ethnic, viz. of Indo-Aryans by Iranians. The fact of an at least partial physical replacement of the native population by invaders is attested by the linguistic shift. Until then, in much of the present-day Pashtu-speaking region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, an Indo-Aryan Prakrit was spoken (remember how the Sanskrit grammarian Panini was a native of Peshawar). It was replaced with Pashtu, an Iranian language.
Koenraad Elst
In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
The virtue of patriotism has been extolled most loudly and publicly by nations that are in the process of conquering others, by the Roman, for example, in the first century B.C., the French in the 1790s, the English in the nineteenth century, and the Germans in the first half of the twentieth. To such people, love of one's country involves denying the right of others, of the Gauls, the Italians, the Indians, the Poles, to love theirs.
W. H. Auden
So far, so good: the Sangh is right about the substantial increase in the Muslim percentage of the Indian population. A realistic projection into the future of present demographic (including migratory) trends does predict a Muslim majority in the Subcontinent by the mid-21st century, and a Muslim majority in the Indian Union by the turn of the 22nd century (in some regions much earlier). Though generally correct, this type of calculation is subject to an unkind comparison: the same type of projection occupies the minds of white racists in the USA. They expect that whites will cease to be the majority there by the mid-21st century, and they too are worried and unable to stem the tide. But there are two important differences.
Koenraad Elst
When Europeans first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is described in scripture... Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists... Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that accompanied their Christianization. (Ch. 30)
Koenraad Elst
Ever since paleontology established the basic outlines of the fossil record more than a century ago, we have known how poorly the old chain of being matches the history of life. Its persistence as a metaphor and even, in Jastrow's case, as an imposed "reality” merely reflects our unwillingness to abandon comfort in the face of evidence.
Stephen Jay Gould
If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.
Robert Hughes
There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. ... I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.
Margaret Atwood
At present the fashion appears to have set in in favour of two very distinct styles. One is a very impure and bastard Italian, which is used in most large secular buildings; and the other is a variety of the architecture of the thirteenth century, often, I am sorry to say, not much purer than its rival, especially in the domestic examples, although its use is principally confined to ecclesiastical edifices. It is needless to say that the details of these two styles are as different from each other as light from darkness, but still we are expected to master both of them. But it is most sincerely to be hoped that in course of time one or both of them will disappear, and that we may get something of our own of which we need not be ashamed. This may, perhaps, take place in the twentieth century, it certainly, as far as I can see, will not occur in the nineteenth.
William Burges
It is far more likely that by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century. Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not realize that they cannot do everything at once.
George Bernard Shaw
GDP! The right concept of economy-wide output, accurately measured. The U.S. and the world rely on it to tell where we are in the business cycle and to estimate long-run growth. It is the centerpiece of an elaborate and indispensable system of social accounting, the national income and product accounts. This is surely the signal innovative achievement of the Commerce Department in the 20th century. I was fortunate to become an economist in the 1930's when Kuznets, Nathan, Gilbert, and Jaszi were creating this most important set of economic time series. In economic theory, macroeconomics was just beginning at the same time. Complementary, these two innovations deserve much credit for the improved performance of the economy in the second half of the century.
Simon Kuznets
Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, on March 23, 1992, less than two months shy of his ninety-third birthday. After 1985, he was unable to work and lost contact with almost all friends and associates. In his last years, almost the only people with whom he had regular contact were his wife, Helene; secretary Charlotte Cubitt, whom he always called "Mrs. Cubitt”; children Larry and Christine Hayek; and Bartley. Hayek was grateful to Cubitt for her assistance from 1977 to 1992. He inscribed in her copy of The Fatal Conceit in 1990: "In gratitude for all her help over so many years F. A. Hayek.”
During his last years, he had periods of more and less lucidity, as well as being ill and depressed. Lord Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs wrote in his obituary of Hayek that "by 1989 the great man had lost touch with affairs.” He was buried in Vienna, the place of his birth.
[...] Friedrich Hayek was the greatest political philosopher of liberty during the twentieth century.
Alan O. Ebenstein
Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives. We will reform Social Security and Medicare, sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent. And we will reduce taxes, to recover the momentum of our economy and reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans. We will build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge. We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors. The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.
George W. Bush
I believe there are three institutions in Western society that could ease the transition into Western citizenship of these millions of nomads from the tribal cultures they are leaving. They are institutions that can compete with the agents of jihad for the hearts and minds of Muslims.
The first is public education. The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century gave birth to schools and universities run on the principles of critical thinking. Education was aimed at helping the masses emancipate themselves from poverty, superstition, and tyranny through the development of their cognitive abilities....This public education was geared toward grooming citizens, not preserving the separateness of tribe, the sanctity of the faith, or whatever happened to be the prejudice of the day.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The injustice and aggression inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people is unparalleled in history, even in the dark ages. An entire people has been displaced from their land and homeland to replace another people. The Arab States have appealed to the world's conscience for nearly a quarter of a century to realize the right and lift the injustice against them, but our pleas have not been heeded, forcing them to take up arms in defense of their rights, lands and sanctities.
Faisal of Saudi Arabia
