Best Century Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.”

“In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.”

“Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses.”

“Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century.”

“Dubai makes perfect sense for Hyperloop One because this is the 21st century's global transport hub, and its leaders understand that Hyperloop One is ushering in the next era of transportation.”

“In the early 19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with them. Doctors didn't know how to fix them, and so they lived with them.”

“JanSport thinks about everything that a person in the 21st century would need, and then creates a pocket for it.”

“A century after some women first got the vote, we are upping the pressure for change to consign Parliament's legacy of inequality in the past.”

“You can't be a first-world economy in the 21st century if you haven't laid the groundwork to seize the opportunities.”

“The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years.”

“We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.”

“Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.”

“You know, 'Top Gun' was the movie I saw in high school that made me want to be a filmmaker. I remember very specifically coming out of the Century 21 Theater in Colorado from seeing it, and my friend saying, 'What did you think of the movie?' And I said, 'I think I know what I want to do for a living.' That's a true story.”

“From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.”

“Failure to take note of the fact that the character of twentieth-century humanity differs from that of humanity in the fifteenth century, let alone before and at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, is to sleep through the process of world evolution.”

“For me, electronic music is the classical music of the 21st century.”

“The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution.”

“We all know that Social Security is one of this country's greatest success stories in the 20th century.”

“The nature of education fundamentally has not changed in a century - and I say this as someone whose parents are both teachers.”

“If human civilization were to be destroyed and its cities wiped off the map, there would be an easy way for future intelligent life-forms to know when the mid-20th century began: plastic.”

“During the twentieth century, men fought on behalf of nationalism. Yet the wars they fought were also engendered by dislocations in world markets and by social revolution stimulated by the coming of the industrial age.”

“I think the Occupy movement is absolutely fantastic; in my opinion, it's probably one of the most important people's movements of the 21st century and the 20th century. The trouble is that nobody really wants to support what they represent. They are too 'grassroots' for their own good.”

“'Line Of Duty' is first and foremost a thriller. But I hope it will also be seen as a revisionist commentary on 21st century policing.”

“Movies are America's primary cultural product, colonizing minds around the world for almost a century.”

“Mitt Romney's energy policy is a relic of the 19th century. We need a 21st century plan. The fate of the planet is at stake.”

“I think we really need to update what we mean by infrastructure for the 21st century.”

“We can't prepare our kids for the 21st century using a 19th-century model.”

“In the 21st century, I think the heroes will be the people who will improve the quality of life, fight poverty and introduce more sustainability.”

“I'm very happy in my 18th century worker's cottage in Kent and playing my music for the dog-walkers paused outside.”

“Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.”

“Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.”

“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.”

“It would be just as pointless to oppose the international use of English today as it would have been to oppose the worldwide use of French in the 18th century.”

“For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.”

“I think I'm living in the wrong century. I would have made a great courtesan. Not a mistress - I could never be kept - but a courtesan with my own rules.”

“We're in a 21st century, transparent and connected world.”

“For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun.”

“Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.”

“If you think of 'Liberty Valance' or 'The Searchers,' there are moments in there that you'll never, ever forget... And it does not matter what century you are from.”

“I am a woman of the 21st Century who is self-assured and speaks my mind.”

“I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.”

“The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.”

“When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake.”

“When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.”

“I am not some intellectual hoping to be understood a century from now. I'm a political leader. I have to stand in front of my community. If I am a metre too far out in front of the people, I'll lose them.”

“Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.”

“As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.”

“That's really the challenge of this century, to develop spokespeople.”

“I have been a national president who gets the job done and who listens and leads effectively. My first term was about dragging the NUS kicking and screaming into the 21st century to make it more effective and representative.”

“A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.”

“Ever since the first power looms put weavers out of work in the late 18th century, technology has increased productivity but threatened jobs for humans.”

“Investing in industries and technology for the 21st century generates high-skilled, high-wage jobs for industries of the future.”

“Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.”

“We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.”

“When I won Miss World, I wasn't even 18, and I only remember, like, I thought of it as a day in the races or something. It didn't feel like it was Miss World of the Millennium Year, the change of the century. I didn't understand the magnitude of it for at least a couple of years.”

“The universities of the 21st century are going to be the smokestacks of the century.”

“I think 21st century should be art without objects.”

“Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.”

“The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.”

“Noncompetes are the type of restriction that Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act, a federal law passed by Congress more than a century ago, is supposed to prevent.”

“I believe that my children, who are young, will look back on the early years of the 21st century in rather the same way I look back on the middle of the 20th: as a time when seemingly respectable people supported discrimination against Americans simply because those Americans were different from themselves.”

“Only recently, during the nineteenth century, and then only in Europe, do we meet forms of the state which have been created by a deliberate national feeling.”

“Ireland is one of the oldest and closest friends of the United States, and the Irish people have been a crucial part of the fabric of our nation for well over a century. It's crucial to continue strengthening our ties and working together for a peaceful future.”

“From the beginning of this century, for a decade as chief minister of Gujarat and for just over four years as India's PM, Modi has made an indelible mark in the annals of our history.”

“In America, we have 19th century school conditions and a curriculum that prepares our kids for the 1990s.”

“I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.”

“No successful civilization prior to the 21st century has ever provided legal preferences for same-sex relationships.”

“In Congress, I have worked with my colleagues to pass the 21st Century Cures Act.”

“You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.”

“For a century after the reign of Frederick, Prussia remained the most prominent Germanic state in Europe.”

“Rich people are so eccentric, and I don't think people really realize. Especially by the turn of the century, they were living like rappers, and there was no income tax. They are some of the most fascinating people, and I am endlessly fascinated.”

“The 'teavangelicals' of the 21st century have flipped the script, turning their ideas about Christianity, social responsibility, and care for the downtrodden into a mythology of Christian founding fathers.”

“For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.”

“After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.”

“I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.”

“We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.”

“It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.”

“I don't think there should be anything that women are embarrassed to talk about in the 21st century, because for the last 100,000 years, men have said everything that's on their minds and described everything they have done.”

“When the film industry moves to the 21st century, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the money used in film-making is clean and devoid of any underworld connections.”

“New York is the city of the 21st century.”

“This part of the 21st century is preoccupied with risk, and there's a lot that law can do to make lives longer and healthier.”

“In fact, 37 percent of all United States Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century have been representatives of the Jewish community.”

“Following Greece's defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1897, Greece's fiscal house was entrusted to a Control Commission. During the 20th century, the drachma was one of the world's worst currencies. It recorded the world's sixth highest hyperinflation. In October 1944, Greece's monthly inflation rate hit 13,800%.”

“I would have been an essayist in the 18th century. Maybe I'd have had one gag in the piece, but essentially I'd be saying something.”

“It's incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women's rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.”

“You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.”

“Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's masters. But so many here in the two volumes of his collected stories, 186 by my count, stories to read, reread, savor over the course of a cold season. Updike's genius in the short form spills out of these many, many pages.”

“What we need to talk about is what we want America to look like: what a sustainable, economically prosperous America looks like in the 21st century, and what we need to do to get there.”

“Just think how much poorer we would be today if the world would have had half as many people in the 19th century as it actually did. You can get rid of Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur; take your pick.”

“I love 19th century fiction and, in particular, fiction written by and about women.”

“My history in show business spans over a quarter of a century, and I have seen many people in the industry struggle with coming out, only to find much more success after they finally did.”

“American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.”

“For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.”

“It's important to remember that the Jacobite Risings of the 18th century constituted a religious civil war, not a nationalistic movement.”

“I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.”

“Up to the 20th century, we can say that this whole period was an Earth epoch, 'Earth' meaning the riches of the earth, simple physical work. That is why there were wars, the movement of frontiers, war over riches.”

“I was in the business for almost a quarter of a century, and I'm very proud of my career.”

“I've always wanted to make a film about the Tong Wars, the rioting and the crime factions in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early part of the last century.”

“If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.”

“Labor looks different in the 21st century. And so should our job training programs.”