Twentieth Century Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Twentieth Century.

The fifties -- they seem to have taken place on a sunny afte

The fifties -- they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Twentieth Century

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Twentieth Century

It is in our interests to let the police and their employers

It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.

Twentieth Century

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a c

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Twentieth Century

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely t

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Twentieth Century

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Maurice MerleauPonty

Twentieth Century

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behi

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff...

Twentieth Century

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning experience. Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a learning experience. It makes me feel less stupid.

Twentieth Century

I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when

I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it. It was possible to live through the decade preoccupied by the mortgage and the pence you saved on your income tax. It was also possible for those of us who saw what was happening to turn our eyes in a different direction; but what, in another decade, had been a trip to the clap clinic was now a trip to the mortuary.

Twentieth Century

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism,

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

Camille Anna Paglia

Twentieth Century

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, des

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

Camille Anna Paglia

Twentieth Century

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties e

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Twentieth Century

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent ne

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Twentieth Century

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Twentieth Century

The Sixties, of course, was the worst time in the world to t

The Sixties, of course, was the worst time in the world to try and bring up a child. They were exposed to all these crazy things going on.

Twentieth Century

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit,

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of history it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Hunter S. Thompson

Twentieth Century

If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies

If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.

Richard D. Rosen

Twentieth Century

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is lik

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.

Jean Baudrillard

Twentieth Century