A Quote by John Lahr

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

John Lahr

Quote Topics

Borrowed British Century Coward Exhaustion Exhilaration Momentum Part Twentieth Twentieth Century Which Wholesale

Quote Author

John Lahr
American - Critic
Born: July 12, 1941

'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

William T. Vollmann

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

Freeman Dyson

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Don DeLillo

The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity.

Lewis Mumford

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

Brigid Brophy

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

Quentin Crisp

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

E. F. Schumacher

Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

The twentieth century had produced a literature in Ireland that kept a tense distance from the sources of faith - and for good reason. Irish writing had suffered a terrible censorship in the twentieth century.

Eavan Boland

The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fear, physical pain, and death are just part of the price Americans pay for the easy access of handguns. It is estimated that the total costs to Americans of gun violence (the vast majority of which involves handguns) is measured in tens of billions of dollars.3 In comparison, the wholesale value of the 1.3 million handguns manufactured in America in 1998 totaled only $370 million.

Josh Sugarmann

Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets.

Jonathan Galassi

I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.