I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.
You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.
I don't know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Although such research [into the paranormal] has yet to produce anything in the way of a repeatable controlled experiment, its practitioners argue that its revolutionary potentialities justify its continuation. My own feeling is that after a century of total failure it has become a bloody bore.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been in existence for most of this century.
My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.
In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.
It [ non-Euclidean geometry ] would be ranked among the most famous achievements of the entire [nineteenth] century, but up to 1860 the interest was rather slight.
For the first half of this century, High Court judges have been cautious to the point of timidity in expressing any criticism of governmental action; the independence of the judiciary has been of a decidedly subordinate character.
In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation
By the end of the Twentieth Century, taxation will be reduced to a minimum, the entire world will be open to trade, and there will be no need of a standing army.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.