Top 66 Twentieth Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Twentieth Quotes from famous people such as Gertrude Stein, Joe Gebbia, Pankaj Mishra, John Young, W. E. B. Du Bois, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twen

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
Gertrude Stein
We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn’t surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.
Joe Gebbia
As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa’s small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
Pankaj Mishra
Twentieth century man must boldly reach out… And purposefully strive to discover the hidden secrets of our universe.
John Young
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
W. E. B. Du Bois
For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future – a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.
James Gleick
On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.
Carroll Quigley
I was Danny Zuko in ‘Grease,’ and I was in the musical ‘Sweet Charity’ and then in the musical ‘On the Twentieth Century.’ They were great. I mean, singing isn’t really my strong suit, but I just really enjoyed it.
Sebastian Stan
It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.
Rollo May
Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.
Simon Newcomb
For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.
Steve Rushin
Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity.
Robert H. Schuller
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
During the second half of the twentieth century, I had the privilege of living through years of intensive erudition, and I realized that Canadians, located in the northernmost region of this hemisphere, were always respectful towards our country.
Fidel Castro
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Tom Brokaw
The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.
Martin Filler
Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.
Annalee Newitz
As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.
Robert A. Dahl
Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century.
Alan J. Heeger
When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.
David Novak
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.
Helen Dunmore
Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it’s a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography – Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes,’ that sort of thing.
James Fenton
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
Martin Amis
I’m supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.
Art Spiegelman
I don’t know how it could be more stark or clear: this entire society is being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.
Russ Feingold
The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.
Rick Perlstein
At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.
Karen Armstrong
Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.
Benito Mussolini
The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.
Judith Tarr
Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism.
Pankaj Mishra
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products a

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.
Linda Colley
It is a startling and solemnizing fact that even as late as the twentieth century, the Great Command of Jesus Christ to carry the Gospel to all mankind is still so largely unfulfilled.
John Mott
The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.
Ron Silver
I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it’s my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it ‘first’ and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, ‘You’ve passed your deadline.’
Dustin Lance Black
The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.
Steven Weinberg
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society.
Carl Bernstein
This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.
Lionel Barrymore
My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
Sylvia Plath
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
Robertson Davies
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
Rush Limbaugh
There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasn’t heard it.
Helen Reddy
Once Europe’s colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization’s primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century – just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.
Claire Saffitz
It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.
Michael Behe