Top 230 Centuries Quotes

The 21st century will be quite unlike the preceding two centuries, in which power was located in Europe and the U.S., and the rest of the world consisted of mere supplicants and bit players.

When we use old confessions and catechisms, we help teach our people that their faith is an old faith, shared by millions over many centuries. We also help them realize that other Christians have asked the same questions.

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.

I placed my new novel, ‘The Book of Lost Fragrances’, in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.

Old Filey lies around the Ravine, a glacial gash running down to Coble Landing. This is the fishing Filey of centuries past, with neat little terraced cottages and a cluster of attractive 18th century houses.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitler’s passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

For centuries, the horrors of war have been sculpted by artists so people would never forget.

Modern man is in crisis. He has degenerated from the redoubtable pillar he became through centuries of refinement and slipped resignedly into the popular depiction of himself as a witless under-achiever, incapable of looking after himself or those around him.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Canada evolved within the British Empire: it inherited the Parliamentary system, the Cabinet system and all the other features of the British constitutional system which had been in place, for the most part, for several centuries before Canada was even thought of.

Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.

Native Americans have faced centuries of atrocities to their people, their land, and their culture – all under various presidents who took an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed – the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.

I don’t think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.

It’s been federal law for over two centuries that the child of an American born abroad is a citizen – a natural born citizen.

In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.

During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn’t figure in European history until 1493.

After centuries of dormancy, young women… can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands.

My grandmother had a courtyard of animals, like goats and chickens. She made ricotta cheese, cooked with potatoes warm from the garden, grew everything from beans to wheat. It was simple, seasonal food, and we all ate what was produced 10 miles from where we lived. It was that way for centuries.

Freedom was the desire of our people throughout centuries. Freedom enabled our people to be owners of their destiny.

All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago.

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.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun’s energy. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.

Hurricane Sandy was one of the most vicious storm systems to hit the New York City area in nearly two centuries.

Thinking about the new epoch – often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity – challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

There is something of the freshness of mind, of the lightness of spirit in Linne which for centuries has been linked in people’s minds with the mountains of Sweden and Swedish joy in nature.

In most, if not quite all, parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

Artists like Mehmood, Dilip Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan are performers… they are born in centuries.

No state, as a matter of public policy, should turn back the clock on progress by, in effect, legalizing and relitigating the same types of discriminatory laws and debates that took America centuries to overcome.

For the past few centuries, we have defined beauty as tall, slender figures, femininity and white skin.

I often think a lot of women’s attraction to vampires is based on the fact that vampires come from centuries ago, from eras of chivalry and courtly virtues.

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

For centuries, prosperity has been easy to define in material terms. At a personal level, by how much one earns; how much one has.

In 2006, I entered the presidential palace in the main square of La Paz as the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Our government, under the slogan ‘Bolivia Changes,’ is committed to ending the colonialism, racism and exclusion that many of our people lived under for many centuries.

We cannot fight just as Dalits. I understand for centuries people have fought each other. It is not easy to bring them together. But we have done this in U.P.

Radical Islam has been the foe of Christendom for centuries.

Ever since Adam’s day, the divine law of the Sabbath has been emphasized repeatedly over the centuries more than any other commandment. This long emphasis alone is an indication of its importance.

If you go back to the really long-run questions that interested me, the big question was why, over the centuries, the millennia, has growth been speeding up?

Classical music thinks in centuries, not four-year terms.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

For more than two centuries since winning our own freedom, we the people of the United States have repeatedly answered the call to lead the quest for freedom around the globe.

People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.