Top 547 Twentieth Quotes & Sayings

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

The best argument for anarchism is the twentieth century.

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

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.

How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.

The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this.

There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasn't heard it.

Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.

'On the Twentieth Century' was always something I wanted to do because of Kristin Chenoweth.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don't want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don't even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That's what I want.

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

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.

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.

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.

The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.

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

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

It's the Twentieth Century ... no more miracles.

The twentieth century belongs to Canada.

News objectivity is a twentieth-century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

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

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasnt heard it.

The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of a Churchless Mission and a Missionless Church

Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

At the end of the day, with all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

Today's Uncle Tom doesn't wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He's usually well-dressed and well-educated. He's often the personification of culture and refinement. The twentieth-century Uncle Thomas sometimes speaks with a Yale or Harvard accent. Sometimes he is known as Professor, Doctor, Judge, and Reverend, even Right Reverend Doctor. This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro -by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Steadiness is coming up short 19 times and succeeding the twentieth.

The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything.

One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.

Success is failing nineteen times and soaring the twentieth.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

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.

It has been said that the three great develpments in twentieth century science are relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. That strikes me the same as saying that the three great developments in twentith century engineering are the airplane, the computer, and the pop-top aluminum can. Chaos and fractals are not even twentieth century ideas: chaos was first observed by Poincare and fractals were familiar to Cantor a century ago, although neither man had the computer at his disposal to show the rest of the world the beauty he was seeing.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.