Last Century Quotes

The dollar used to be a gold standard currency. And the dollar is really good in the last century, I mean in the 19th century.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.

America is unique in the history of the world. During this last century, there was only one nation that laid down hundreds of thousands of lives of its own sons and daughters and asked for nothing for itself …. America is unique. You took no land from the Germans, no land from the Japanese. All you asked for was enough land to bury your dead.

We must expect for a long time yet to see capitalists still striving to obtain the highest possible profits. But observe, that the passion for wealth is certainly in some senses new. It grew up very rapidly at the beginning of the present century; it was not so strong in the last century, when men were much more content to lead a quiet easy life of leisure. The change has really influenced the relations between men; but in the future it is quite possible that the scramble for wealth may grow less intense, and a change in the opposite direction take place.

Climate science is to this century what eugenics was to the last century.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.

By the latter part of the last century, the Indians finally realized that … treaties were real-estate deals designed to separate them from their lands.

From last century's 'The Birth of a Nation' to this century's 'Gods and Generals,' Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War and, thus, modern America's very origins.

My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.

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.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

When you go to our political system, I feel like it's intentionally kept in the last century. In every other facet of life, we turn to social media for instant response time, complete transparency.

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

I was fortunate in the last century to be in the two biggest hits film-wise, 'Godfather I' and 'Godfather II,' and 'Lonesome Dove.'

In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

Last century we needed lawyers; this century we need big, broad coalitions. When extremists decide to attack all our communities, they must hope that there will be infighting. But we have stood all for one and one for all. That is how we will win.

I would direct your attention in some detail to the vast and irreparable calamity brought upon our nation in the last century by a tiny group of vociferous and crazed fanatics, the abolitionists, who forced upon the South its tragic war for independence.

The free trade movement in the middle of the last century represents the first conscious recognition of these new circumstances and of the necessity to adapt to them.

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

Meryl and Katharine Hepburn are probably the two greatest actresses of this and the last century.

In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care.