In the twentieth century, many influential figures have shared their thoughts and ideas through quotes. These quotes reflect the significant events and changes that occurred during this time period. They provide insight into the advancements in technology, the social movements, and the impact of wars and conflicts. Quotes from the twentieth century also capture the struggles, resilience, and triumphs of individuals and societies as they navigated through the challenges and opportunities of the era.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. — Albert Camus
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. — W. E. B. Du Bois
Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century. — Russell Lynes
A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks. — Todd Gitlin
If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse. — Theodore Dalrymple
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. — J. G. Ballard
If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century... I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators. — Dennis Prager
We've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. — Amory Lovins
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. — Ravi Zacharias
We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century — Oriana Fallaci
It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking. — Ron Paul
In 1920 [H.G. Wells] described human history as becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe. — Joel Garreau
Short Twentieth Century Quotes
History has shown that at least one-half of every century is consumed in war. — James Monroe
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle. — Eric Hobsbawm
Solidarity was the best thing which happened in the 20th century. — Mikhail Saakashvili
There are always decades that interest people. For me, that's the Roaring Twenties. — Ian Somerhalder
In the 21st century, somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. — Eddie Obeng
Top 10 Twentieth Century Quotes
How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century. — Aneurin Bevan
We are so utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a Power the Twentieth Century does not reckon with.... Oh that God would make us dangerous! — Jim Elliot
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. — Joseph Brodsky
Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said. — Peter Lewis Allen
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. — Donna J. Haraway
It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century. — Alex Carey
Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure. — Thomas Szasz
Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions. — A. J. P. Taylor
Life is like a parachute jump, you've got to get it right the first time. — Eleanor Roosevelt
The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us. — Neil Postman
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Twentieth-century Quotes
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything. — Malcolm Muggeridge
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. — Arundhati Roy
The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity. — Leopold Sedar Senghor
Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction. — Marion Woodman
Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead. — Jim Morrison
In the twentieth century, government control of money has meant a new and very important criterion being added to salability, and that is the salability of money according to the will of its holder and not some other party. — Saifedean Ammous
Net-zero policy, if actually implemented, would certainly be the most significant act of mass murder since the killings of one hundred million people by communist regimes in the twentieth century – and it would likely be far greater. — Alex Epstein
The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. — Eric Schlosser
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
The three metals most widely used for this role were gold, silver, and copper, and their use as coins was the prime form of money for around 2,500 years, from the time of the Lydian king Croesus, who was the first recorded to have minted gold coins, to the early twentieth century. — Saifedean Ammous
Twentieth Quotes
It is the author’s opinion that the history of China and India, and their failure to catch up to the West during the twentieth century, is inextricably linked to this massive destruction of wealth and capital brought about by the demonetization of the monetary metal these countries utilized. — Saifedean Ammous
Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century. — Dennis Prager
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.) — Michael Pollan
Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. — Michael Denton
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible. — Jill Lepore
The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. — Arundhati Roy
The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective. — Arnold J. Toynbee
In this twentieth century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience. — Frederick Franck
If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love. — Amy Carmichael
Nineteenth Century Quotes
The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. — Ida B. Wells
I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference. — Ludwig Quidde
One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian. — Mortimer Adler
In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. — Luigi Russolo
The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America. — Thaddeus Stevens
I would rather be a member of this [Afrikan] race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century. — Edward Wilmot Blyden
Here was St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. How to build a hotel to meet the requirements of nineteenth century America and have it in keeping with the character of the place ? that was my hardest problem. — Henry Flagler
When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century. — Satyajit Ray
A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile. — William Winwood Reade
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. — Margaret Fuller
With the simple suspension of gold redeemability, governments’ war efforts were no longer limited to the money that they had in their own treasuries, but extended virtually to the entire wealth of the population. For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war. Previously, under a monetary system where gold as money was in the hands of the people, government only had its own treasuries to sustain its war effort, along with any taxation or bond issues to finance the war. This made conflict limited, and lay at the heart of the relatively long periods of peace experienced around the world before the twentieth century. — Saifedean Ammous
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. — Donna J. Haraway
Today the governments of Latin America should be ashamed of not havingexterminated the indigenous, at the end of the twentieth century, because weexist at the end of this century. We are not myths of the past, ruins in thejungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims ofintolerance and racism. — Rigoberta Menchu
In their seminal work, 'The History of Science and Technology', Bunch and Hellemans compile a list of the 8,583 most important innovations and inventions in the history of science and technology. Physicist Jonathan Huebner analyzed all these events along with the years in which they happened and global population at that year, and measured the rate of occurrence of these events per year per capita since the Dark Ages. Huebner found that while the total number of innovations rose in the twentieth century, the number of innovations per capita peaked in the nineteenth century. A closer look at the innovations of the pre-1914 world lends support to Huebner's data. It is no exaggeration to say that our modern world was invented in the gold standard years preceding World War I. — Saifedean Ammous
The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. — Russell Kirk
In reality, once one overcomes the propaganda of the twentieth-century state, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. If an action has no victims, it is no crime, regardless of what some self-important voters or bureaucrats would like to believe about their prerogative to legislate morality for others. — Saifedean Ammous
The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century. — Immanuel Wallerstein
The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present. Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the twentieth century. — Manolo Blahnik
Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language. — Jerome Kern
In the twentieth century, men -- all of us -- find themselves compelled to commit or condone evil for the sake of preventing an evil believed to be greater. And the tragedy is that we do not know whether the evil we condone will not in the end be greater than the evil we seek to avert-- or be identified with. — Emil Fackenheim
All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. — Jerry Saltz
Twentieth-century man needs to be reminded at times that work is not the result of the Fall. Man was made to work, because the God who made him was a 'working God.' Man was made to be creative, with his mind and his hands. Work is part of the dignity of his existence. — Sinclair B. Ferguson
Nothing will convince and convict those around us like the peaceful and positive way you and I respond to our twentieth century hurts and distress. The unbelieving world-your neighbors, the guy at the gas station, the postman, the lady at the cleaners, your boss at work-is observing the way we undergo our trials. — Joni Eareckson Tada
In Conclusion
The quotes about the twentieth century offer a glimpse into the diverse perspectives and experiences of people from different walks of life. They reveal the hopes and fears, dreams and aspirations of those who lived through this time. These quotes encapsulate the spirit of innovation, progress, and a desire for a better future that defined the twentieth century. They serve as a reminder of the lessons learned and the progress achieved, as well as the ongoing challenges that continue to shape our world today.
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Citation
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