In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.
We Americans sit at the head of the banquet table, as we have done for a century. Our standard of living is luxurious by any measure.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.
We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.
Our CO2 mixes with everyone else's within a year, then hangs around for centuries like a shroud.
Sustaining growth is the century's big challenge.
History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.
I'd been a Superman fan since the time I was a little kid. We had great respect for the Donner movie, and Superman II with Terence Stamp as Zod but I felt it was time to bring the character into the 21st century.
John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
We need 21st century programs. We have to change the dynamic because the world - we're not in the Industrial Revolution anymore, where you could leave high school, go work at the town factory for 50 years, and retire with a pension.
It's foolish to talk of an "Asian century" or an "emerging market century" because events move at a pace that renders this degree of durability obsolete.
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.
While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.
If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.
Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth.
I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.