German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Manhattan... capital of the 20th century, a city that has fascinated me for more than three decades.
The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn't know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.
Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared as biological understanding accumulated over the last century.
Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
There's a sort of eternal, indefinable 20th century quality to 'BTAS.' We never really pegged the decade, but it's anytime in the 20th century, so I often harkened back to things from the '40s or '50s.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
Rosa Parks' courage, determination, and tenacity continue to be an inspiration to all those committed to non-violent protest and change nearly half a century later.
I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
It's a good thing I was born in this century, when superfluous television seems to be part of the economy.
I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.
The Smithsonian should box and preserve Tim McGraw's Nashville den for a future exhibit entitled 'Early 21st Century American Man Cave.'
Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.
Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.
In this new century, our commitment to family and to faith, to community and opportunity, to freedom and to hope, will be the light that shines to lead us forward.
All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.
The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.
The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.
One layer was certainly 17th century. The 18th century in him is obvious. There was the 19th century, and a large slice, of course, of the 20th century; and another, curious layer which may possibly have been the 21st.
We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction 'If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.'
I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
After a century of striving, after a year of debate, after a historic vote, health care reform is no longer an unmet promise. It is the law of the land.
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
