Century Quotes

• Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.

  

  Wendy Doniger
  • Spring
  • Members
  • Powder

• The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

  

  Maya Angelou
  • Black
  • Poor
  • Century

• In the next century it will be the early mechanical bird which get the first plastic worm out of the artificial grass.

  

  Bill Vaughan
  • Firsts
  • Bird
  • Grass

• The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

  

  Alain Aspect
  • World
  • Development
  • Physicists

• Analysis does not owe its really significant successes of the last century to any mysterious use of sqrt(-1), but to the quite natural circumstances that one has infinitely more freedom of mathematical movement if he lets quantities vary in a plane instead of only on a line.

  

  Leopold Kronecker
  • Freedom
  • Movement
  • Mysterious

• The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

  

  J. Robert Oppenheimer
  • Century
  • Privilege
  • Vedas

• For more than two centuries, the defenders of liberty have put their lives on the line, because they have known that we cannot take our freedoms for granted.

  

  Virgil Goode
  • Liberty
  • Granted
  • Defenders

• I don't think he'd [Andy Warhol] be that amazed because he was so driven to be the Picasso of the second half of the 20th century.

  

  Bob Colacello
  • Century
  • Picasso
  • Andy Warhol

• All the nationalists are wasms - except one, the most powerful of this century, indeed, of the entire democratic age, which is nationalism.

  

  John Lukacs
  • Age
  • Powerful
  • Democratic

• The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism.

  

  Will Hutton
  • Decision
  • Financial
  • Capitalism

• The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

  

  Martha Gellhorn
  • Good
  • Pretty
  • Proud

• We decided we'd have to do something pretty drastic to make people realise that I wasn't going to parade about in ra-ra skirts for the rest of the century. And I'm not going to parade about in black evening gowns on tour!

  

  Claire Patricia Grogan Altered Images
  • People
  • Black
  • Realising

• The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.

  

  Bruce Sterling
  • Century
  • Ruins
  • Frontiers

• In the nineteeth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments. The twitch above my right eye will disappear with knitting practice.

  

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
  • Believe
  • Eye
  • Causes

• Just because we are not seeing a collapse today doesn’t mean we are not subjecting humanity to a process that could lead to catastrophic outcomes over the next century.

  

  Johan Rockstrom
  • Today
  • Humanity
  • Process

• Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

  

  Walter de La Mare
  • Men
  • Knows
  • Flower

• She was a giant in the 20th century for women, and most significantly was a catalyst for change in the American culture. She defined the problem, and then she had the courage to do something about it.

  

  Eleanor Smeal
  • Women
  • She
  • American

• Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.

  

  Whittaker Chambers
  • Century
  • Anybody
  • Picked

• The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."

  

  Arthur Holly Compton
  • Ideas
  • Lord
  • Students

• Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

  

  Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Forgotten
  • Century
  • Anarchist

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

  

  Miguel de Unamuno
  • Terrible
  • Alchemist
  • Sociologists

• God raises up such men as John Bunyan and William Huntington but once in a century.

  

  William Romaine
  • Century
  • Raise

• The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.

  

  Thomas Sowell
  • America
  • Century
  • Administration

• The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.

  

  William Manchester
  • Color
  • Delicate
  • Wardrobe

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