Twentieth Century Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Twentieth Century.

I knew the youthfulness of the sixties: Talitha and Paul Get

I knew the youthfulness of the sixties: Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakesh, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future.

Yves SaintLaurent

Twentieth Century

Infantilism is possibly the hallmark of our generation.

Infantilism is possibly the hallmark of our generation.

Twentieth Century

The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The p

The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.

Eugenio Montale

Twentieth Century

All that Swinging Sixties nonsense, we all thought it was pa

All that Swinging Sixties nonsense, we all thought it was pass? at the time.

Twentieth Century

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact tha

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.

Eldridge Cleaver

Twentieth Century

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

Twentieth Century

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises -- it is a set of challenges.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Twentieth Century

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beg

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.

Margaret Drabble

Twentieth Century

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with i

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

Twentieth Century

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.

Twentieth Century

At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-centu

At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater and lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens -- women, workers and the members of subject races -- to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.

Twentieth Century

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities a

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

Twentieth Century

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a s

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

Twentieth Century

To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you ac

To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.

Twentieth Century

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part,

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

Twentieth Century

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign poli

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Twentieth Century

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, i

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

Twentieth Century

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the wor

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Twentieth Century

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Twentieth Century

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said Yes, we have no bananas, and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were -- and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

Twentieth Century