When my parents were growing up the world's population was under three billion. During my children's lifetime, it is likely to exceed nine billion. You don't need to be an expert to realise that sustainable development is going to become the greatest challenge we face this century
Uncommon things must be said in common words, if you would have them to be received in less than a century.
If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is. Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he waited a thousand years before doing it. They forget to say that he is the slowest mover in the universe, that his Eye That Never Sleeps, might as well, since it takes a century to see what any other eye can see in a week.
It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust. '. . . It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.
I would rather be a member of this [Afrikan] race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century.
If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.
This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
If we don't take the necessary measures, famine will be the scandal of this century.
Our future begins on January 1 1999. The euro is Europe's key to the 21st century. The era of solo national fiscal and economic policy is over.
We are just coming out of a 100-year stupor from being lied to by the tobacco industry for a century about the effects on young people, on cancer, these candy cigarettes that they promised had nothing to do with kids, Joe Camel that they promised was focused on the, you know, 55-year-old white male smoker, which we know is wrong. And we finally got out of that. Why in the world would we want to create the same thing, just not Big Tobacco this time, Big Marijuana?
I'm concerned about the role the court will play in protecting individual rights in this and the next century.
I think it is something that is so important, to be very aware of the direction in which the 21st century is going with all this blind faith in democracy. And by the way, I am not against democracy - I am against the blind faith that is being put in democracy.
No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.
A woman was the property of her father or her husband and that remained true right into the twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that women had a guaranteed right to serve on federal juries.
Male homosexuals have seduced and abused millions of underage boys. Their unclean sexual habits and ultra-promiscuous lifestyle have resulted in spreading the worst communicable plague in this century, the specter of AIDS, which has not only killed millions of their own, but also millions of others, including tens of thousands who contracted the virus from blood transfusions.
A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.
It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.