Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, early, twentieth and/or century:
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The twentieth year is well-nigh past;
Since first our sky was overcast,
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!
Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow—
‘Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disus’d, and shine no more,
My Mary!”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)