century

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.What a very feware acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

—Levi, Primo

'Poe,' I said,'was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry.

—Thurber,James Grover

She was thinkingöfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other wayöthat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentöfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.

—Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined bya hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall payany price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.

—Kennedy,John F(itzgerald)

Mr Morgan struck me as a healthy and childish Britisher probably inhabiting the early19th century.

—MacLeish, Archibald

As a military man who has given half a century of active service,Isay inall sincerity thatthenucleararmsracehas no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons; their existence onlyadds to our perils because of the illusions that they have generated. The world now stands on the brink of the final abyss. Let us all resolve to take all possible practicable steps to ensurethat we donot, through ourownfolly, go over the edge.

—Nicholas, 1st Earl

If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game† In a world haunted by thehydrogenand napalm bomb, thefootball field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.

—Rous, Sir Stanley

   The century on which we are entering, the century that will come out ofthiswar, can be and must be the century of the common man.

—Wallace, HenryAgard

   The century that began with a golden age in all the arts (or at least the golden twilight of one) is ending not so much without art as without the idea of art.

—Vidal, Gore originally Eugene Luther Vidal,Jr

What our sword has won in half a year, our sword must guard for half a century.

—Moltke, Helmuth von, Count

The horrorof theTwentieth Century was the size of each event, and the paucity of its reverberation. 540

—Mailer, Norman Kingsley

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!†whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age† Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

—Arnold, Matthew

In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

—Gill, Brendan

The Republican Party needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

—Stevenson, Adlai E(wing)

The great man†walks across his centuryand leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his galoshes as he passes.

—Leacock, Stephen Butler

Die Zeit hat inWirklichkeit keine Einschnitte, es gibt kein Gewitter oder Drommetenget o« n beim Beginn eines neuen Monats oder Jahres, und selbst bei dem eines neuen S a« kulums sind es nur wir Menschen, die schieÞen und l a« uten. Timehasno divisionstomark its passage, there isnevera thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

—Mann,Thomas

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

—McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall

Le dix-neuvie'  me sie'  cle est grand, mais le vingtie'  me sera heureux. Thenineteenth century isgreat, butthetwentiethwill be happy.

—Hugo,Victor Marie

No writer before the middle of the19th century wrote about the working classes other thanasgrotesques oras pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

—Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.

—Du Bois,W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)

The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.

—Small, AlbionW

Sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century.

—van den Berghe, Pierre L

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

—Dudek, Louis

   Goodbye Mr Zanuck. It certainly has been a pleasure working for16th Century Fox.

—Renoir,Jean