Think about technological float: it took centuries for the wheel to gain universal acceptance. Now any microchip device can be in use around the world in weeks.
Modern low temperature physics began with the liquefaction of helium by Kamerlingh Onnes and the discovery of superconductivity at the University of Leiden in the early part of the 20th century.
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'
The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.
Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.
Christopher McCandless: Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.
I shall work with Congress, civil society groups and local government executives who are convinced that charter changes are needed to enable the country to surmount the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century.
The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and ...
I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.
One of the advantages of the book's having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries.
From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.
One aspect of this is the way we have come during recent centuries to appreciate that the world and indeed the very universe in which we live have evolved over immense periods of time.
Michael Corleone: Italian politics have had these men for centuries. They are the true Mafia.
And the annual meetings of the League's Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.
I understand the power of the Internet, but I can't say that I'm there. I'm old-fashioned and living in a different century. I don't know. I just don't really understand the craze of it.
As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
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.
