Twentieth Quotes

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. (Norman Mailer)
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. View quote
Gertrude Stein
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time. View quote
Margaret Mead
The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century. View quote
Adlai Stevenson II
I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse. View quote
Bing Crosby
It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness. View quote
Rollo May
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment. View quote
E. L. Doctorow
The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof. View quote
Anzia Yezierska
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. View quote
Erich Fromm
In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century science is sufficiently advanced to resolve the puzzles that stymied scientists in the last century and demonstrate, without metaphysical speculation, the consistency of evolution in all realms of experience. It is now possible to advance a general evolution theory based on unitary and mutually consistent concepts derived from the empirical sciences. (Ervin László)
As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century. View quote
Robert A. Dahl
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed. View quote
Helen Dunmore
In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living. View quote
Stella Gibbons
It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature. View quote
Frederick Rolfe
In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them. View quote
Ravi Zacharias
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. View quote
Simone Weil
The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value. View quote
Simone Weil
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. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world... (Nâzım Hikmet)
These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. View quote
Arundhati Roy
Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape. View quote
Barbara Hepworth
These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson