Quotes of Twentieth - somelinesforyou

“ The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. ”

- Albert Camus

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

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

“ 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. ”

- Adlai E. Stevenson

“ This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts. ”

- A. L. Rowse

“ Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind. ”

- John Stuart Mill

“ Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism. ”

- Angela Carter

“ Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. ”

- Greg Egan

“ Of course you'll live, red-haired lady of my heart: in the twentieth century grief lasts at most a year. ”

- Nazım Hikmet

“ Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism. ”

- Benito Mussolini

“ In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. ”

- Erich Fromm

“ Ads are the cave art of the Twentieth Century. ”

- Marshall McLuhan

“ Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. ”

- Marshall McLuhan

“ Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of Twentieth Century. ”

- J. G. Ballard

“ Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. ”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“ How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! ”

- John Milton

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

- Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

- Margaret Mead

“ Life in the twentieth century undeniably has… such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams. ”

- Arthur H. Campton

“ The fear of life is the favorite disease of the twentieth century. ”

- William Lyon Phelps

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

- Norman Mailer

“ When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms… ”

- Steven Halpern

“ The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash… ”

- John Berger

“ The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone… ”

- Betty Friedan

“ The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War. ”

- William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

“ The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in. ”

- Gertrude Stein

“ Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values. ”

- A. Alvarez

“ War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable not merely thinkable but practicable… ”

- E. J. Hobsbawm

“ The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated Twentieth Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography… ”

- J. G. Ballard

“ The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed. ”

- Alan Keyes

“ Well I failed to bring Roger to Flint. As we neared the end of the twentieth century, the rich were richer, the poor, poorer. And people everywhere now had a lot less lint, thanks to the lint rollers made in my hometown. It was truly the dawn of a new era. ”

- Michael Moore
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