The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Time and space-time to be alone, space to move about-these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.

Artists have no less talents than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked its surface.

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

In a contrary and perhaps cruel way the twentieth century has relieved us of labor without at the same time relieving us of the conviction that only labor is meaningful.

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.

The fin is coming early this siecle.