"Twentieth century" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and being besieged by interviewers in search of a "story," I found myself, without seeking adventure, one of the chief actors in a drama which was perhaps one of the strangest and most astounding of this our twentieth century. ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... has only been one large original pile of buildings erected in Paris—a pile in accordance with modern developments—and that's the central markets. You hear me, Florent? Ah! they are a fine bit of building, though they but faintly indicate what we shall see in the twentieth century! And so, you see, Saint Eustache is done for! It stands there with its rose-windows, deserted by worshippers, while the markets spread out by its side and teem with noisy life. Yes! that's how I ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... would have you study the genesis of a great crime, because you must remember that in respect to sin, there is very little to choose between the twentieth century and the first; between the sin of that civilization and of ours. This is why the Bible must always command the profound interest of mankind—because it does not concern itself with the outward circumstances and setting of the scenes and characters it describes, but with those ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... rectifying this smuggling evil. This increased watchfulness plus the gradual reduction of duties brought the practice of smuggling to such a low point that it became unprofitable, and the increased risks were not the equivalent of the decreased profits. This same principle, at least, is pursued in the twentieth century. No one is ever so foolish as to try and run whole cargoes of goods into the country without paying Customs duty. But those ingenious persons who smuggle spirits in foot-warmers, saccharine in the lining ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... the shades of the past had come to life again, to repeat in the twentieth century a happening of the nineteenth. There was only one difference—no form of a dead man now lay against the foot wall, to rest there more than a score of years until it should come to light, a pile ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of my study, was a dramatist and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the twentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten is by no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with a charming indecision of touch. The general prejudice against the granting of freeholds has spread to the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... can safety be insured as economically and as efficiently. Indeed, in matters of national security, economy and efficiency are equivalent terms. The question of the Pacific is probably the greatest world problem of the twentieth century, in which no great country is so largely and directly interested as is the United States. For the reason given it is essentially a naval question, the third in which the United States finds its ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... allowance lasted three days. Tea, the great modern beverage, was rather a luxury and appears to have been used sparingly and rum, which retailed at 8 pence a pint, was used almost universally. Human nature was much the same in the eighteenth as in the twentieth century. The men often drank to excess, and some of them would have been utterly unreliable but for the fact that Simonds and White were masters of the situation and could cut off the supply. They generally doled out the liquor by ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... across the Dvina River like the Twentieth Century Limited passing Podunk, and snowflakes are as numerous as retreating Germans were in France a few weeks ago. We have good quarters when we are here, thank fortune for that, and good food, when it comes up. If we can stand the winter we will be all jake, for a Yank can accustom himself to anything ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... appreciated and extolled by my husband more than you ever realized. He predicted twenty years ago what has now come, and mainly through the instrumentality of yourself and her—the advancement and elevation of womanhood—and we are only on the eve of what is to follow in the twentieth century. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the field of Wagram the horrible voices of the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Ou, ou sont les aigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the Emperor, he replies, 'La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, 'Et ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... discovery of the century is the discovery of woman. We have emancipated her, and are opening countless opportunities for our girls outside of marriage. Formerly only a boy could choose a career; now his sister can do the same. This freedom is one of the greatest glories of the twentieth century. But with freedom comes responsibility, and under these changed conditions every girl should ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... architecture. For the most part the houses that lined it were blocks of contiguous cottages, which had been converted either singly or by twos and threes into dwellings containing the comforts demanded by the twentieth century, but externally they preserved the antiquity which, though it might be restored or supplemented by bathrooms or other conveniences, presented a truly Elizabethan appearance. There were, of course, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... any of the others, the Twentieth Century will be democratic. The greatest discovery of the Nineteenth Century was that of the reality of external things. That of the Twentieth Century will be this axiom in social geometry: "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." If something needs doing, ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... spoliation. There is nothing to stop you; your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. Either civilization or liberty will perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Fair Hathaway of fifteen years before, looted and burned by the people of Su'u after all hands had been killed. Truly, the Solomons at this beginning of the twentieth century were savage, and truly, of the Solomons, this great island of Malaita was ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... majesty, King Henry the Eighth, had done its work. The monks had fled. The walls had crumbled, and in the twentieth century, the abbey was a modern country house, and the ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... of school I would give you if I were a better teacher, and could have my way, the people of the cities would be begging to have their children admitted so that they might obtain real culture—culture fitting them for life in the twentieth century—" ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... belongs to the twentieth century. A few years ago there died in the village of Eral, in Tinnevelly District, a local gentleman of the Shanar caste named Arunachala Nadar. There was nothing remarkable about his career: he had lived a highly respectable life, scrupulously ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... Shipman. But the name of the original hunter was not Nathaniel. He was David Shipman. His grave is not far from Cooperstown, in the Adams burying ground between the villages of Fly Creek and Toddsville, and at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked with a tombstone by Otsego chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. David Shipman's descendants live in Cooperstown at the present time. When the Hoosick Falls claim to Leather-Stocking was first published in 1915, it was accompanied with the statement that the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... produce a complete series of pictures commencing with the Ice Age and finishing at the dawn of the twentieth century. In the earlier chapters only a rough outline is possible, but as we come down the centuries and the records become more numerous and varied, fuller details can be added to the pictures of each age, and we may witness how much or how little ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... worker. The men of the eighteenth century made political institutions, and were content with democracy; the men of the nineteenth century, accepting government as it stood, built up a new industry. The society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon the political and industrial triumphs of our forefathers, can never be successful unless it recognizes the fundamental character of the issues which nineteenth century industry and eighteenth century politics have ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... islanders from the Azores and Cape Verde. The Finns are here, the Lithuanians from Russia, the Magyars from Hungary. The Greeks are pouring in from their sunny hills and valleys; they rival the Italians in the fruit trade, and monopolize the bootblack industry in certain cities. With the twentieth century have come the Turks and their Asiatic subjects, the Syrians and the Armenians. All these peoples have race peculiarities, prejudices, and superstitions. Most of their members belong in the lower grades of society and their coming is a distinct danger to the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the human race altered just as drastically in an equally short span of time. As recently as the nineteenth century, the incidence of disease was a thousandfold greater than it is now. Life was short then. In the twentieth century disease lessened and life-expectancy doubled, in certain areas. Height and weight increased perceptibly with every passing decade. Then came Leffingwell and his injections. Height, weight, life-expectancy have fallen perceptibly every ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... transposition of epochs. King felt already as if the twentieth century had never existed, just as he seemed to have left life behind for good and all when the mosque door had ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the first decade of the twentieth century, the Kaiser seemed to be most active in interfering in European politics, including those of Morocco, in which the French were entangled. In 1904 the war between Russia and Japan broke out. Roosevelt remained strictly neutral towards both belligerents, making it evident, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... know what's the matter with kids these days? It's the twentieth century," he said. "It's a disease. It starts in their teeth. No modern girl can get married unless she has had her teeth straightened for years. Our dentist's bill, this year alone, was over eight hundred dollars. But that isn't all. It gets into their young intestines, God bless 'em, and makes you ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evil impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in Twentieth Century times. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "It was in the twentieth century that the Movement began—during one of the periodic wars. The Movement developed rapidly, feeding on the general sense of futility, the realization that each war was breeding greater war, with no end in sight. The ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... We of the twentieth century know better! We know that all religious aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source and one goal. We know that the God of the lettered and the unlettered, of the Greek and the barbarian, is ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order. And yet are there not lacking signs that the quaint pot-pourri of whimsicalities will one day coalesce into a well-defined, artistic composition, a twentieth century City Beautiful. God grant its ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... as constituted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Crown is a many-sided factor. The personal and diplomatic influence of the Sovereign is obvious and was illustrated by Queen Victoria in such historic incidents as the personal relations with King Louis Philippe which ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... flint on which his mind could strike fire—nothing is so depressing as continual, mushy adulation. He sought out the Countess, and together they traversed the border-land of metaphysics, and surveyed, as the days passed, all that intellectual realm which the dawn of the Twentieth Century thinks ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... to the Corinthians, "I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures," he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher and teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth century no less than of the first. It is with some surprise, therefore, we discover when we turn to the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He had so little to say concerning a subject of which His disciples have said so much. It is true that the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... expect—it is the twentieth century," Miss Falconer retorted, putting aside her knitting as ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than woman's and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... can learn too early in life the value of time and the opportunities within reach of the humblest children of the twentieth century to enable them to make of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... glaring light of the twentieth century it at last clearly appears that marriageable young women have always looked upon marriage as the chief means of escape from the abject slavery and humiliating dependence hitherto imposed upon virgins between fifteen and fifty years ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... conquerors and partly to the prepossession that most men, even able ones, seem to be shackled with; namely, that the origin of America's former inhabitants is to be sought in some people of Asia. If they would leave that question for the twentieth century to decide, and begin a painstaking inquiry into what was going on in this country before its discovery, ask not who, but what sort of men inhabited it, their habits and their relations, the gentlemen who compose this society of Americanistes would probably reach valuable ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... "Yes, the twentieth century has many conveniences," Mr. Wicker replied, and Chris could imagine, behind him, the man's sardonic smile ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... nation during the reign of Queen Victoria was marvellous. At the commencement of that period the railway system was only in its infancy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the country is covered from end to end with a complete network of railways; a journey which, in the old times of stagecoaches, took two or three weeks, being now accomplished in a few hours. The perfection of the railway system has afforded facilities for a wonderfully ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... taught them to act it; and, in order to warn them against shallow views of life, he wrote a comedy, "Diogenes the Cynic, Revived." He was no vulgar materialist. His whole object was moral and religious. If Comenius had lived in the twentieth century, he would certainly have been disgusted and shocked by the modern demand for a purely secular education. He would have regarded the suggestion as an insult to human nature. All men, he said, were made in the image of God; all men had in them the roots of eternal wisdom; all men were capable ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... recent volume of essays written at Oxford.[32] But even if the rising tide of neo-Kantianism should cause the speculative mystics to be regarded with disfavour, nothing can prevent the religion of the twentieth century from being mystical in type. The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... back in the Twentieth Century, Christian calendar, they had an economic depression. During it a crackpot organization called Thirty Dollars Every Thursday managed to get itself on the ballot. Times were bad enough but had this particular ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... one of the most extraordinary features of our extraordinary age. It is startlingly significant of the change that has taken place that Russia and Japan, nations 7,000 miles apart by land and a still greater distance by water, are able in the opening years of the twentieth century to wage war in a region which one army can reach in four weeks and the other in four days, and that all the rest of the world can receive daily information as to the progress of the conflict. A half century ago, Russia could ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... pack the nuclei heavier than that. The trick was to find a chain of reactions that gave the least necessary energy transfer. The method by which the reactions were carried out might have driven a mid-Twentieth Century physicist a trifle ga-ga, but most of the reactions themselves would ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... have some business that has hung fire an unconscionable time, and ungallant as it seems, we twentieth century fellows have to put business before pleasure." He smiled propitiatingly and therein lay the sting, that he did not even take the trouble to conceal that he was trying to appease her. Their parting sank to the level of the commonplace for he shook hands hastily, and her look of appeal flattened ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Street appears vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they say—schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort and another. But with regard to the life of the very poor, of the submerged, I have seen signs in the twentieth century which to my experienced eye suggested that no fundamental change had taken place since I lived among these ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the fact that they have no rational concept whatever of the psychical nature of man, not even a "working hypothesis" of the Human Soul. Theologians affirm, "Science" denies, and so they still face each other in this Twentieth Century with "A war of words," though, to a considerable extent, they have ceased making faces and calling each other names, because there is a deeper struggle ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... here called upon to pronounce judgement on these principles; but in passing we shall endeavour to point out how far the demands and doctrines of the Land Reformers of the Seventeenth Century, as revealed in Winstanley's writings, coincide with those of their successors in the Twentieth Century. In all cases we shall, as far as possible, let ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... but following in the footsteps of the heirs to the thrones of Austria and Belgium, who have both visited the United States for the purpose of improving their minds, and of fitting themselves more thoroughly for their duties as twentieth century rulers. The present Emperor of Russia, and his younger brother, the late Czarevitch George, likewise started on a tour round the world, which in the case of George was cut short at Bombay by that sickness to which he subsequently succumbed, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... scintillations from press and pulpit—utterances which epitomize the story of the birth of Christian Science, in 1866, and its progress during the ensuing thirty years. Three quarters of a century hence, when the children of to-day are the elders of the twentieth century, it will be interesting to have not only a record of the inclination given their own thoughts in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but also a registry of the rise of the mercury in the ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... sciences have said their last word and that we have nothing more to expect from them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate Guyau's prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world." But, though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of this twentieth century the nations upon which depends the world's peace or war, happiness or misfortune, are the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Japan, and in the near future China. Here we see that Europe, although little larger ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... the twentieth century, too, Mr. Norwood. Perhaps you hadn't heard what we've been doing these last four years? Oh, quite a lot of it. . . ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... stupid bed of King Og that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of the twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst the jeering contempt of the whole world—and we felt it acutely for several years. We began to question ourselves. Mr. Brumley found his ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... picture, but I fain would see A sketch of what your promised land will be When, with electric nerve, and fiery-brained, With Nature's forces to its chariot chained, The future grasping, by the past obeyed, The twentieth century rounds a new decade." ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... comfort of the millions of suffering children in Europe. The explanation lies simply, although mysteriously, in his own personality. I say mysteriously, for, despite all the wonderful new knowledge of heredity that we have gained since the beginning of the twentieth century, the way by which any of us comes to be just the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. Herbert Hoover is simply a kind of man who, when brought by circumstances face to face with the distress of a people, is especially ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... Maximilian, Henry had some notion of preempting the vacant throne, but soon discovered that Charles V. of Spain had a prior lien to the same, and thus, in 1520, this new potentate became the greatest power in the civilized world. It is hard to believe in the nineteenth or twentieth century that Spain ever had any influence with anybody of sound mind, but such the veracious historian tells us ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... tonight two hostile armies are facing each other—that now, while we are seated here, a million human beings may be hurled at each other's throats, striving with the fury of maniacs to tear each other to pieces! And this in the twentieth century, nineteen hundred years since the Prince of Peace was born on earth! Nineteen hundred years that his words have been preached as divine, and here two armies of men are rending and tearing each other like the wild beasts of the forest! ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... civilisation. You can trust them in anything, if your demand be for nothing extremely intelligent or absurdly altruistic. One of these could be exhibited in any gallery in the universe, 'Perfect Specimen; Upper Middle Classes; Twentieth Century'—and we should not be ashamed. They are not vexed by impossible dreams, nor outrageously materialistic, nor perplexed by overmuch prosperity, nor spoilt by reverse. Souls for whom the wind is always nor'-nor'-west, and they sail nearer success than failure, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... present and utter barbarism were too few to have accomplished more than the initial stages of a true civilization. No doubt a thousand years hence these stages would appear as rudimentary as the age of the Neanderthals had seemed to the twentieth century. And as man made progress so did he rarely outstrip it. So far he had done less for himself than for what passed for progress and the higher civilization. Naturally enough, when the Frankenstein monster heaved itself erect and began to run amok with seven-leagued boots, all ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... miles of Pullman and other trains, including the Twentieth Century Flyer, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, extended from Lima to Lafayette, held up by a wash-out. Repairs allowed the trains to move on about ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... port is distributed over the world. But a change is coming. I am sure of it. You young men," he turned to Presley, Lyman, and Harran, "will live to see it. Our century is about done. The great word of this nineteenth century has been Production. The great word of the twentieth century will be—listen to me, you youngsters—Markets. As a market for our Production—or let me take a concrete example—as a market for our WHEAT, Europe is played out. Population in Europe is not increasing fast enough to keep up with the rapidity of our production. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... There was no "Twentieth Century Limited," making the trip in twenty hours, in those days, and my two nights and a day on the road gave me ample time for contemplation, which I was in a mood to avail myself of. I felt all the eagerness of youth, ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... virile essay at expression of living thought. The later Renaissance was but half modern in its spirit; the classic period of the eighteenth century in England was half ancient in its mood. But the twentieth century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute. This adjuvant strain is found ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... been arrived at: we are still on the run. This twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... the most reliable clue to the history of their progress in culture and intelligence, for religions even when unwritten are potent to conserve old conceptions, and thus their followers advance beyond them, as does the intelligence of the twentieth century look pityingly upon the conception of the cruel and jealous God of the Old Testament, whose praises are nevertheless still sung in every Christian church. Thus in Tahiti the people were not cannibals, but the gods still ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... English many quaint ideas about life, living, and literature ... A belated Elizabethan who has strayed into the twentieth century! These piping little essays are mellow and leisurely!"—The ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... color in Islamic flags, with the Shahada or Muslim creed in large white Arabic script (translated as "There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God") above a white horizontal saber (the tip points to the hoist side); design dates to the early twentieth century and is closely associated with the Al Saud family which established the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Africa. To its call came alien peoples speaking words that none but themselves could translate, wearing garments of exotic cut and hue amid the smart garbs and sober hues of modern civilization. A twentieth century Babel came to the fields of France for freedom's sake, and there was born an internationalism making for the future understanding and peace of the world. The list of the twenty-eight nations entering the World War and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... of Panama cannot be exaggerated. Bolivar wisely deemed it of greatest moment, and what has occurred during the twentieth century has proved that Bolivar was ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... between two civilisations in India which were hardly susceptible of being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms. The instinct to simplify—to get down to something in nature that included the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in which his contemporaries were moving. While Mr Kipling's generation ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... at this moment three or four hundred of the polling-booths,—nice little houses, enough better than most of the peasantry of most of Europe ever lived in. They are, alas, generally packed up in lavender and laid away for ten months of the year. But in the twentieth century we shall send them down to the shores of islands and other places where people like to spend the summer, and we shall utilize them, not for the few hours of an election only, but all the year round. This will not then be called "Nationalism," ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan's officers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the mediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed to all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average of marksmanship than the soldiers of any Western nation. The engineers of Japan deepened and widened the intricate system of canals, built factories and foundries, netted the empire ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... he stabbed her. It is only said in closing the story that the blood of both the fair and adventurous young Quakeress whose abounding spirit brought on all the trouble, and that of the leader of the "Tories," flows in the veins, of some who live on the Hill in the twentieth century. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... Fisherman's Rest" is a show place now at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the eighteenth, in the year of grace 1792, it had not yet gained the notoriety and importance which a hundred additional years and the craze of the age have since bestowed upon it. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... plan. I dealt first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times; then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering. I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting twentieth century ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... And France fiercely, proudly proving her right to live an independent nation. And Germany. Germany! the last word in intellectual power, in industrial achievement, in scientific research, aye and in infamous brutality! Germany, the might modern Hun, the highly scienced barbarian of this twentieth Century, more bloody than Attila, more ruthless than his savage hordes. Germany doomed to destruction because freedom is man's inalienable birthright, man's undying passion. Germany! fated to execration by future generations for that she ahs ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... overview: Aided by peace and neutrality for the whole twentieth century, Sweden has achieved an enviable standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. It has a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labor force. Timber, hydropower, and iron ore constitute the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Nora Norris Newman; The Crown-Snatcher, by Reginald Rodman Roony—oh, it's simply ghastly to think of what you've missed! This is the Victorian era; you have a right to be fully cognizant of the great literary movements of the twentieth century!" ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... character. "It excited vigilance," he said, "against any encroachment of violence or rapacity; it ensured to the people that which they most required—repose, security, and tranquillity." The immense annexations of territory and far-reaching reforms which have created the British India of the twentieth century were either most reluctantly sanctioned by the court of directors or have been carried out since its dominion was transferred to the crown. Irrevocable as they are, and beneficent as they may be on the whole, they have certainly imposed difficulties of portentous ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... lines, American genius for organization and large scale production has developed mammoth industries. In nearly all the tendency to combination and concentration has exercised a predominating influence. In the early years of the twentieth century the public realized, for the first time, that one corporation, the American Sugar Refining Company, controlled ninety-eight per cent of the business of refining sugar. Six large interests—Armour, Swift, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... informed them. "He is the fellow whom I saved from suicide at Monte Carlo, and now he is in the ranks of the men who have planned the worst crime of the twentieth century. Surigny is now where his follies have placed him—associated with the vilest creatures who disgrace ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... ideas about things," Paul went on. "They talk about romance and adventure and all that, but I say romance and adventure are dead. We're too civilized. We don't have adventures in the twentieth century. We go ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... enthusiast for the acquisition of knowledge, and while his passion for physiology induced—as it so often does—an indifference regarding the infliction of pain, his pitiless vivisections were not more cruel than experiments made in this twentieth century, and some of them by men of national reputation. He was the type of the class of experimenters whom Dr. Johnson had in his mind, men whose long practice in the infliction of torment creates an indifference to the ordinary emotions of humanity, so that even in the causation of agony ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... a Swiss village, or a French country town, or a hamlet in Arizona, it would have had its electricity fifteen years ago, but being only a progressive English Borough, with an annual value of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, it struggled on with gas till well into the twentieth century. Its great neighbour Hanbridge had become acquainted with electricity in ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... present at the siege of Malta and, besides this, as is well known, gossiped in his own inimitable way concerning men and women of his time, from corsairs to courtesans. When such contemporary authorities as those mentioned could not agree it is quite certain that we of the twentieth century cannot decide on the rival claims to distinction between the Bashaw of Tripoli and his follower Occhiali, as he was known to the Christians, or Ali Basha, as he was called by the Turks. Ali Basha has a title to fame in the fact that he is mentioned by Cervantes in his Don Quijote ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... property, not only will the working man have learned his true place in society, not only will the landed and mercantile aristocracy have received a mortal blow, but Communist Anarchism will be the goal of the evolution of the twentieth century. ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... Pine, saw again at its base the print of the little girl's foot—wondering afresh at the reason that led her up there—and dropped down through the afternoon shadows towards the smoke and steam and bustle and greed of the Twentieth Century. A long, lean, black-eyed boy, with a wave of black hair over his forehead, was pushing his horse the other way along the Big Black and dropping down through the dusk into the Middle Ages—both all but touching on either side the outstretched ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... finding themselves. Even America's Eve discovers that pains and aches are not "woman's lot." She is under no curse in the twentieth century. With eighteen dollars a week for ringing up fares, and a possible thirty-five for "facing" fuse-parts, nothing can persuade her to be poor-spirited. She radiates the atmosphere, "I am needed!" Doors fly open to her. She is welcome everywhere. No one seems to be ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... is the problem which History has put before the men of the twentieth century: the return to Communism in all that ministers to ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... But in this twentieth century it is impossible for gentlemen to spend the whole evening in the dining-room. Wine drinking is no longer recognised as a valid excuse for the separation of the sexes and tobacco is so universally tolerated that men carry ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the twentieth century before our era, a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within the domain of the Kings ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... brothers and sisters. In this way there is no break in the family relation and the child does not grow indifferent to home ties, as so often happens when he is sent to a residential school. Mr. Irwin says "the special class is the twentieth century emphasis on the integrity ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... could not enter his nineteenth century mind. But his mind turned at once from the scenery to the thought of a vanished dread. "What of the yellow peril?" he asked and Asano made him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished. Chinaman and European were at peace. The twentieth century had discovered with reluctant certainty that the average Chinaman was as civilised, more moral, and far more intelligent than the average European serf, and had repeated on a gigantic scale the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... in numbers and too weak to endure success. At the beginning of the twentieth century—as they counted time—huge fortunes were amassed in a day, and the Mehrikans became drunk ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... of religious thinking in A.D. 1800, and the hangman was at the back of the law; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman seemed on the verge of extinction. The creative impulse was everywhere replacing fear and compulsion in human motives. The opening decade of the twentieth century was a period of unprecedented abundance in everything necessary to human life, of vast accumulated resources, of leisure and release. It was also, because of that and because of the changed social and religious spirit, a period of great social ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... burdened with the letters of applicants who were suffocating in the "man-stifled towns," and it soon dawned upon me that a twentieth century Ulysses required a corps of stenographers to clear his correspondence before setting sail. No, adventure is certainly not dead—not while ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... last month about the guilds of four hundred years ago. I asked you then to look upon yourselves as members of a great twentieth century working guild. Have you done it? Has every man, who was present then, said since, when hewing a foundation stone, a block for a bridge abutment, a corner-stone for a cathedral or a railroad station, a cap-stone for a monument, a milestone, a lintel ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... from her work, "it doesn't seem as though this were the twentieth century at all. Here we are, as much adventurers as they were in the old times of Jason and ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... further incentive to hate! If only some means could be discovered to remove John, and soon! But while Ferdinand thought these things, watching his so-called brother from across the room, he knew that he was impotent. Poisons and daggers were not weapons which could be employed in civilised Paris in the twentieth century! If they would only ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the Silurian, and in the lowest of these rocks we find beautifully preserved fossils of Bryozoans, to all appearances as perfect in detail of structure as these which we have before us to-day in this twentieth century of man's ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... land tilled by one family in Japan does not exceed one hectare" (2.471 acres), less than two and a half acres. ("Japan in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century," page 89. Published by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... held, when he is no longer here, to have been endearing qualities. And for manliness, for downright English God-fearing virtues, for love of Queen, country, family and home, they may search in vain to find his equal among the cosmopolitan Englishmen of the dawning twentieth century. His faults were many, and at one time he went near to sacrificing his daughter to save his house, but he would not have been the man he was ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... war. When that happened these dream-pedlars surely should have perceived that the game was up. They had always known that only by devoting its first half to the accumulation of wealth and culture could the twentieth century hope in its second to make good some part of its utopic vision. Wealth was the first and absolute necessity: Socialism without money is a nightmare. To live well man must be able to buy some leisure, finery, and elbow-room. Anything is better than a poverty-stricken communism in which no one can ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference. It is not enough to say that the twentieth century is the best age in the history of mankind, and to take refuge from the evils of the world in skyey dreams of good. How many good men, prosperous and contented, looked around and saw naught but good, while millions of their fellowmen were bartered ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... private and public provision of water in the underground reservoirs by artesian bores, and the facilities for travelling stock by such ways have all lessened the risks which the pioneer pastoralists ran bravely in the old days. An Australian drought can never be as disastrous in the twentieth century as it was in 1866; and South Australia, the Central State, has from the first been a pioneer in development as well as in exploration. The hum of the reaping machine first awoke the echoes in our wheatfields. The stump-jumping plough and the mullenicer which beats down ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... secular life of our twentieth century opens with this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that they don't seem to belong to the twentieth century at all. Their long trunks, their huge shapes, all seem part of the remote past. They are just the remnants of a breed ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... several generations of d'Haussonvilles. On the stairway are numerous genealogical charts and family trees of the Neckers, doubtless reaching back to Attila, if not to Adam, for strange as it may seem the great Swiss financier was as much addicted to vain genealogies and heraldic quarterings as a twentieth century American. ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... you not look farther still, and see that, however good Claridge Pasha's work might be some day in the far future, it is not good to-day. It is too soon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps. Men pay the penalty of their mistakes. A man's life"—he watched her closely with his wide, benevolent eyes—"is neither here nor there, nor a few thousands, in the destiny of a nation. A man who ventures into a lion's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... spectroscope. The direct use of the eye is gradually giving place to indirect methods. We are, in fact, now feeling rather than seeing our way about the universe. Up to the present, for instance, we have not the slightest proof that life exists elsewhere than upon our earth. But who shall say that the twentieth century has not that in store for us, by which the presence of life in other orbs may be perceived through some form of vibration transmitted across illimitable space? There is no use speaking of the impossible or the inconceivable. After the extraordinary revelations of the spectroscope—nay, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... the adventurous. In this prosaic twentieth century the Land of Romance still beckons to eager eyes and gallant hearts. The rutted money-grabber may deny till he is a nerve-racked counting-machine, but youth, even to the end of time, will laugh to scorn his pessimism ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... in the same way. A fine thrill could be made to go from the last new book through the whole community, so that people would not willingly rest till they had it. Yes, one can see an indefinite future for advertising in that way. The adsmith may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century. He may assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... historically famous "labor troubles" for more extended consideration, we may summarize here a few of the results of hardly more than a century and a quarter of "self-government" as it existed on this continent just previously to the awful end. At the beginning of the "twentieth century" a careful study by trustworthy contemporary statisticians of the public records and those apparently private ones known as "newspapers" showed that in a population of about 80,000,000 the annual number of homicides was not less than 10,000; and this continued year after year to increase, not ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down these differences until finally one—nationalism—accomplished the purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in literature ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... Marchand's colonial troops, carried most of the German first and parts of their second line of defence, and thousands of prisoners and scores of guns fell into their hands. But victory was not in this Western warfare of the twentieth century won in a day, and the morrow of a successful attack, which used to be fatal to the defeated, was now more trying to the victors. Instead of their well-protected lines they had to lie in the open or in the blasted ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... democratic revolt which had swept over Europe during the first decade of the twentieth century was continued in 1910 by the revolution in Portugal. This, as the result of long secret planning, burst forth suddenly before dawn on the morning of October 4th. Before nightfall the revolution was accomplished ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... that this work be brought down to date, I have again restudied the subject in the light of various works which have appeared since my earlier research,—especially Levasseur's "Histoire des classes ouvrieres et de l'industrie en France,"—one of the really great books of the twentieth century;—Dewarmin's superb "Cent Ans de numismatique Francaise" and sundry special treatises. The result has been that large additions have been made regarding some important topics, and that various other parts of my earlier work have been ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... incredulously as she thought again of the ominous surmises of the impossible Herr Windt. There was something of the opera bouffe about his methods which abstracted from the brilliancy of his success. To Marishka he was still the head waiter. This was the twentieth century. No political secret could justify the imprisonment or death of a woman!... She shuddered a little, as she thought of the very death that had been planned by the employers of Herr Windt—Austrians—loyal Austrians he called them, of the same blood and lineage perhaps as herself. She had not ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... of her sentiments toward him; he asked permission to woo, and if in his eagerness he forestalled the etiquette of the occasion she modestly referred him to her parents, first indicating her consent would accompany theirs. In the twentieth century the young people too often settle the matter between themselves, and announce their intentions to wed quite regardless of their parents' sentiments on the subject. So many youthful attachments are really youthful follies that the girl who submits her wishes to her parents' ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... in many countries, "Fanshawe" fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative of Scott than the "Sorrows of Werther" is of Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the "Sorrows of Werther" ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why "Fanshawe" should not have proved a success. It lacks the grace and dignity ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... years of the twentieth century a spirit of Maratha nationalism has been sedulously ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... polluting flood of Oriental life in our midst. After many days vices come home. Man sowed the wind; the whirlwind must be reaped. The Oriental slave trader and the Oriental slave promise to become a terrible menace and scourge to our twentieth century civilization. Herein lies great peril to American womanhood. Whether we wish it to be so or not,—whether we perceive from the first that it is so or not, there is a solidarity of womanhood that men and women must reckon with. The man who wrongs another's ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... cold in those hearts and minds which have not had the power to grow and expand with their ages. But with that splendid sanity of body as well as mind which belongs to him, Mr. Gladstone is the creature of the ending of the nineteenth as of the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the man of Arctic climes, he stands almost at the same moment in the sunset of one great century and the heralding light of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... of Agathe's children, who physically resembled his mother, had the moral qualities of his grandfather, Doctor Rouget. We will leave the solution of this problem to the twentieth century, with a fine collection of microscopic animalculae; our descendants may perhaps write as much nonsense as the scientific schools of the nineteenth century have uttered on ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... tell sadly we are going, going fast, And the thought comes strangely o'er me, who will live to be the last? When the twentieth century's sunbeams climb the far-off eastern hill, With his ninety winters burdened, will ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... only was the beast his enemy and he the enemy of the beast; but his hand was against his fellow-man and his fellow-man's hand against him. This mutual hostility followed men in their first groupings into communities, and only to a degree have we lived it down in the twentieth century. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... know that the nineteenth century was marked by a separation of the sciences into a vast number of specialties, to the subdivisions of which one could see no end. But the great work of the twentieth century will be to combine many of these specialties. The physical philosopher of the present time is directing his thought to the demonstration of the unity of creation. Astronomical and physical researches are now being united in a way which is bringing ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... country. Perhaps within another decade, when the Isthmian canal is finished, the golden stream which will connect the waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, we may celebrate at the national capital city the greatest event of the twentieth century, bringing to the commerce of the world peace and plenty. At the same time we may hope to celebrate the establishment of our American merchant marine, the one thing needed to carry our American products and goods into the harbors of the world, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Drapeau. Despite our unlimited admiration for Claretie the journalist, Claretie the historian, Claretie the dramatist, and Claretie the art-critic, we think his novels conserve a precious and inexhaustible mine for the Faguets and Lansons of the twentieth century, who, while frequently utilizing him for the exemplification of the art of fiction, will salute him as ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the volumes before us is, however, more varied and comprehensive, reaching as it does from the fourth to the twentieth century, than any collection known to the writer. In the selection Professor Kleiser has brought to his task a personal knowledge of homiletic literature that is the product of much observation and study during many years, and an enthusiasm for his work that has been fostered ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various |
