Century Quotes

As we have throughout this century, we will lead with the power of our example, but be prepared, when necessary, to make an example of our power. ~ William J. Clinton

As St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century said it best, "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. ~ Shawn Achor

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. ~ G.K. Chesterton

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

Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty. ~ Don Kates

As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. ~ Pankaj Mishra

So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order. ~ Laura Kipnis

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Even now, over a half-century later, the engraved words stirred emotions in him he would rather not confront. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. ~ Margaret Fuller

{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}

He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.

Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.

He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable. ~ Ernst W. Mayr

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available. ~ Bill Bryson

In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave. ~ Stefan Zweig

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries ... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references! ~ Bart D. Ehrman

There have always been hucksters, cranks and populists who see a brief rise in American politics, going back to William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the century. The body politic has a way of expelling these invaders. ~ Joseph Rago

three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible - because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations - voters, inventors, scientists - with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades. ~ Nick Bostrom

But did you know that during the past quarter century, no presidential election has been won by more than ten million ballots cast? Yet every federal election during the same time period had at least one hundred million people of voting age who did not bother to vote! ~ Andy Andrews

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. ~ Kenneth Clark

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century. ~ John Guare

Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

The transition to a low-carbon economy will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. This plan sets out a route-map for the UK's transition from here to 2020 ... every business, every community will need to be involved. Together we can create a more secure, more prosperous low carbon Britain and a world which is sustainable for future generations. ~ Ed Miliband

My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy. ~ Vandana Shiva

In the middle Ages, Berber was written in the Maghribi style of the Arabic script, in what is to all appearances a standardized orthography. The earliest known examples of the medieval Berber spelling date from the middle of the 10th century A.D., while the youngest examples date from the 14th century.

Although there is some variation in the representation of a number of consonants, the orthography is remarkably consistent. In this respect it is quite unlike the early orthographies of the European vernaculars, where the same word is often written in different ways even within one line of text. This consistency implies that the Berber orthography was consciously designed, and that it was formally taught to berberophones.

"MEDIEVAL BERBER ORTHOGRAPHY" - MELANGES OFFERTS A KARL-G. PRASSE (pp. 357-377). ~ Nico Van Den Boogert

When I stopped viewing girls as potential girlfriends and started treating them as sisters in Christ, I discovered the richness of true friendship. When I stopped worrying about who I was going to marry and began to trust God's timing, I uncovered the incredible potential of serving God as a single. . . .

I believe the time has come for Christians, male and female, to own up to the mess we've left behind in our selfish pursuit of short-term romance. Dating may seem an innocent game, but as I see it, we are sinning against each other. What excuse will we have when God asks us to account for our actions and attitudes in relationships? If God sees a sparrow fall (Matthew 10:29), do you think He could possibly overlook the broken hearts and scarred emotions we cause in relationships based on selfishness?

Everyone around us may be playing the dating game. But at the end of our lives, we won't answer to everyone. We'll answer to God. . . .

Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry. If a young man spent time at a girl's home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her. But shifting attitudes in culture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes. The new "rules" allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having ~ Joshua Harris

The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species. ~ Richard L. Currier

Rousseau's ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. 'Everything,' he wrote, 'is at root dependent on politics.' Virtue is the product of good government. 'Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.' The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. ~ Paul Johnson

Office. "Freaking glorious." I hefted my bag higher on my shoulder and I headed out. Tank was standing guard on the sidewalk, in front of my car. "I have a couple FTAs," I said to Tank. "One's in the Burg and one's in Hamilton Township. I have to stop at my apartment first to get some clean clothes and stuff." "It might be easier if we took one car for the busts," Tank said. I agreed. "Do you want to drive or ride shotgun?" Tank's eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. Shocked that I would even consider driving. Tank only rode shotgun to Ranger. "It's the twenty-first century," I told Tank. "Women drive." "Only in my bed," Tank said. "Never in my car." I didn't have a reply to that, but I thought it sounded like an okay philosophy. So I beeped the Escape locked, got into Tank's SUV, and we chugged off for my place. ~ Janet Evanovich

In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say. ~ Elizabeth Peyton

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. ~ W. H. Auden

Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?"
Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."
Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not.
Our readers of that time ( ... ) have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. ( ... ) ~ T.H. White

Arys raised his head to look at me. His expression took on an intensity that held me transfixed. "I've spent over a century knowing I'd likely never know you. I've been waiting for you for a hundred years. Being with you is surreal. We were created as one. The moments that bring jealousy and pain, they're temporary. We are forever. ~ Trina M. Lee

One of the most important secret societies of the 20th century is called the Round Table. It is based in Britain with branches across the world. It is the Round Table that ultimately orchestrates the network of the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. ~ David Icke

The twenty-first century will be a time of awakening, of meeting the creator within. Many beings will experience oneness with God and with all life. This will be the beginning of the golden age of the new human, of which it has been written; the time of the universal human, which has been eloquently described by those with deep insight among you. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

There shouldn't be a separation of any religion in any way. Unfortunately, through the centuries there have been problems from the "My God is better than your God" mentality. ~ Kevin Sorbo

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. ~ Albert Camus

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century. ~ Bob Newhart

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness. ~ Alice Morse Earle

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature. ~ Alan Bennett

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries. ~ Brian Ferneyhough

«"I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!" Gavin broke in. "How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?"
"You don't know about steampunk?" shouted Xavier, dubiously.
"Well, I don't read many novels! Because I'm kinda fully-booked already! But, obviously, you're a science fiction writer at a Futurist conference! And I can see that you're all dressed up like some fancy guy from the past, from the 19th century! So what gives with that? What is all that about?"» ~ Bruce Sterling

What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines? ~ Matthew B. Crawford

Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

The Greeks, at least by the fourth century BC, knew Britain as Albion. Originally applied to a Spanish tribe called the 'Albiones', the term was later adopted for Britain, perhaps because of its similarity to the Greek word for whiteness, alphos, thanks to the white chalk cliffs of the southeast coast. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, says that Britain had 'previously' been called Albion, so by then the name must have fallen out of common use.2 By the time Britain began to be referred to more frequently, the Greeks called it Prettannia, or Brettannia.3 What does seem certain is that in the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) sailed to Britain. Pytheas wrote down his experiences, but these only survive as incidental third-hand references by later writers. Most ~ Guy De La Bedoyere

Comparing the vast knowledge base that has been accumulated, tested and proven for evolution, the continuing flow of new information that further adds to the knowledge base and a century and a half of unsuccessful attempts to falsify it by the scientific community, it becomes inconceivable that anyone still believes in the bizarre details of the Genesis creation myth. ~ Al Stefanelli

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

For the next century, the Republicans have agreed that we will promote the dignity and future of every individual by building a free society under a limited, accountable government that protects liberty, security and prosperity for a brighter American dream. ~ Todd Tiahrt

Occasionally, in each age and in different lands, a Buddha is born, that is to say, an enlightened person ... they re-codify the ways, the practices, they make changes that are just intelligent changes that adapt to a new century, a new culture. ~ Frederick Lenz

The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible. ~ Niall Ferguson

Yes, hypothetically, western Catholicism could revise the theme of celibacy ... But for the moment, I am in favor of maintaining celibacy, with the pros and the cons it has, because we have ten centuries of more good experiences than bad ones. ~ Pope Francis

Her blouse, and he saw the bruised imprints of two fingers. Just then a gang of blacks came out from among the trees carrying the wounded man on a rough stretcher. "Romantic, isn't it?" Sheldon sneered, following Joan's startled gaze. "And now I'll have to play surgeon and doctor him up. Funny, this twentieth-century ~ Jack London

Groves of orange and lemon perfumed the air, their ripe fruit glowing among the foliage; while, sloping to the plains, extensive vineyards spread their treasures. Beyond these, woods and pastures, and mingled towns and hamlets stretched towards the sea, on whose bright surface gleamed many a distant sail; while, over the whole scene was diffused the purple glow of evening. ~ Ann Radcliffe

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced. ~ Graham Greene

that was how plenty of people felt in 634 BC in Rome, as well, when they were convinced that the city was destined to collapse after 120 years of existence. It is how people have felt at countless points in history since then. Try searching Google's library of digitised manuscripts for the phrase 'these uncertain times', and you'll find that it occurs over and over, in hundreds of journals and books, in virtually every decade the database encompasses, reaching back to the seventeenth century. 'As a matter of fact,' Watts insisted, 'our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new. ~ Oliver Burkeman

Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton's most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe's great color work, like Newton's, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein's last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery. ~ Oliver Sacks

Any act of hatred or violence to anyone on this planet is an act of hatred to everyone. To destroy other innocent lives because they act or feel different, believe different ideologies or religions, speak a different tongue or are a different color is a abomination and crime against humanity. The world is diverse ... it always will be. Diversity is what makes us human. It's time to stop acting like 1st century barbarians destroying everything we believe is wrong and for the sake of humanity ... put all our differences to bed and try to get along. ~ Timothy Pina

Well, on some level, it's similar to the psychological phenomenon of helplessness, where the will to try is lost. You get to the point where you just assume that your spontaneous call to a friend will go to voicemail or an assistant, and you decide not to bother. ~ Zack Love

Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war. ~ Ahmed Zewail

Fact is, the first 100 years of our country's history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks. The third century is about ideas. ~ Seth Godin

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance. ~ Charles Tilly

If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty. ~ Norman Mailer

Yes, guilty.' It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent - do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the last century of our glorious history? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

What a tragic irony, that the more we understand of biology, the less we have of it to learn from and enjoy. What will be the legacy of this new century - to cherish and to protect Nature or to see butterflies and zebras and much more vanish into legend like the thylacine, moa and dodo? ~ Sean B. Carroll

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today. ~ Leonid I. Brezhnev

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing. ~ Victor Hugo

third understanding of the imago Dei also gained popularity in the twentieth century, though it too had historical predecessors. In the early part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth argued that the central defining feature of the imago Dei is human relationality. Hence, this view is called the relational view of the imago Dei. Humans are created in the image of the Triune God and thus are meant to find their essence and destiny in community with one another and with God The following three essays offer arguments in favor of each of these views. ~ Gregory A. Boyd

In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, 'for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century'. That's what the Academy was always for - to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art. ~ Edward Jay Epstein

WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius. ~ Julian Barnes

Human women have been slapping men for being bastards for centuries. You were doing what comes naturally. ~ Nalini Singh

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time. ~ Seth Shostak

I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century. ~ Werner Heisenberg

He resolved for Detective Geyer to undertake a careful and methodical search for the blunder which a criminal always makes between the inceptions and consummation of his crime. ~ J.D. Crighton

J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike. ~ Jeffrey K. Zeig

'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

Channel Firing
BY THOMAS HARDY
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

"That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening....

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, ~ Thomas Hardy

When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism – there was no alternative – and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare.

There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communism states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union.

As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West – Europe and the United States above all – missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts. ~ Tony Judt

You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up. ~ Margaret Atwood

We also wanted to change the story - change the approach to the 21st century on energy, on education, on transportation, on infrastructure, generally, and it laid the groundwork for that. And one of the reasons I'm doing this trip is not only to say what we did worked, but to say we should do more of this. ~ Joe Biden

I can think of few more worthy achievements than keeping a library alive and well for a century. As far as I am concerned, one of the absolute backbones of a free society and a democracy is the library offering access to a treasure house of information to all. ~ Gillian Roberts

He lives century after century, and the test I set for him he has passed. ~ Meera

I, like almost all chemists I know, was also attracted by the smells and bangs that endowed chemistry with that slight but charismatic element of danger which is now banned from the classroom. I agree with those of us who feel that the wimpish chemistry training that schools are now forced to adopt is one possible reason that chemistry is no longer attracting as many talented and adventurous youngsters as it once did. If the decline in hands-on science education is not redressed, I doubt that we shall survive the 21st century. ~ Harry Kroto

I think that in the 21st century, medical biology will advance at a more rapid pace than before. ~ Shinya Yamanaka

The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking. ~ Megan Smith

The 19th century became the age of the museum. Objects were scrambled for, specimens seized, and friezes and antiques grasped. ~ Kate Williams

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure. ~ Sheldon Lee Glashow

Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal! ~ Charles De Gaulle

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. ~ Alan Turing

Yet Laudan's mother had no choice about whether to be a good cook or not. It was simply what was expected of her, and of every other farmer's wife in England at that time. She did not cook because she 'loved' cooking but because this was the role that life had allotted her.
There was nothing unusual in the way that Laudan's mother cooked. If anything, her life in the kitchen was easy by the standards of the day. At least a farmer's wife had access to plentiful meat and vegetables, whereas city cooks in early twentieth-century Britain were expected to produce the same quantity of meals but with meagre ingredients and limited equipment, often in single-room dwellings where there was no kitchen and no escape from cooking. We idealise the homespun meals of the past, imagining rosy-cheeked women laying down picturesque bottles of peaches and plums. But much of the art of 'cooking' in pre-modern times was a harried mother slinging what she could in a pot and engaging in a daily smoke-filled battle to keep a fire alive and under control, on top of all the other chores she had to manage.
Before we offer too many lamentations for the cookery of the past, we should remember how hard it was – and still is, for millions of people – to cook when you have no choice in the matter. ~ Bee Wilson

All Romani dialects – about 60 in all - contain Armenian words, proof if you will that the Lom Bosha passed through Armenia in the early 11th century, trading spices along the Great Silk Road, that network of ancient trade routes connecting China with the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Romani traded Armenian carpets, silk, dyes, lapis lazuli and tin, and it's no surprise that five capitals of Armenia are on The Great Silk Road. ~ Karl Wiggins

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid? ~ John Archibald Wheeler

I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground. ~ Brenna Yovanoff

The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. ~ James Hansen

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another. ~ Milton Friedman

...so profound an insight into God that for a century and a half he was branded a dangerous atheist... ~ Stephen Mitchell

From the same twelfth-century bestiary, we learn that the hedgehog is covered with spikes and curls itself into a ball for protection; that the fox is a 'fraudulent and ingenious animal' that plays dead in order to catch its prey; that cranes move about in military formation; that the serpent called 'basilisk' can with the power of its glance; that the lynx's urine turns into a precious stone; that lions are compassionate and courageous, and that the eyebrows and manes offer a clue to their disposition. Finally, many (but not all) entries go on to draw a moral or make a theological point on the basis of the animal description. The hedgehog is an example of prudence, the crane of courtesy and responsibility. The fox is employed as a type of the devil, who entices carnal man through fraudulent behavior. And the male lion, breathing life into its stillborn offspring after three days, represents God the Father raising Christ from the dead. ~ David C. Lindberg

The factory system is one of the worst and cruelest things ever invented to pamper the rich at the expense of the poor. It fattens them, and melts the flesh off our bones: it clothes them in grand raiment, and bids us shiver in rags: it brings all indulgences within their reach, and kills the industrious creatures whose toil provides them. ~ Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

We got lots of secrets, Will. You Apollo guys can't have all the fun. Our campers have been excavating the tunnel system under Cabin Nine for almost a century. We still haven't found the end. Anyway, Leo, if you don't mind sleeping in a dead man's bed, it's yours-Jake
Suddenly Leo didn't feel like kicking back. He sat up, careful not to touch any of the buttons. The counselor who died-this was his bed-Leo
Yeah. Charles Beckendorf-Jake
Leo imagined saw blades coming through the mattress, or maybe a grenade sewn inside the pillows. He didn't, like, die IN this bed, did he-Leo
No. In the Titan War, last summer-Jake
The Titan War, which has NOTHING to do with this very fine bed-Leo
"The Titans," Will said, like Leo was an idiot. The big powerful guys that ruled the world before the gods. They tried to make a comeback last summer. Their leader, Kronos, built a new palace on top of Mount Tam in California. Their armies came to New York and almost destoyed Mount Olympus. A lot of demigods died trying to stop them-Will
I'm guessing this wasn't on the news-Leo
It seemed like a fair question, but Will shook his head in disbelief. You didn't hear about Mount St. Helens erupting, or the freak storms across the country, or that building collapsing in St Louis-Will
Leo shrugged. Last summer, he'd been on the run from another foster home. Then a truancy officer caught him in New Mexico, and the court sentenced him to the nearest correction fac ~ Rick Riordan