“Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century.”
Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) Artist and political activist
Gustav Metzger: 'Destroy, and you create', 2012
Modulations: A history of electronic music
“Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century.”
Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) Artist and political activist
Gustav Metzger: 'Destroy, and you create', 2012
“Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer
Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict http://books.google.co.in/books?id=4aECmbMMzIYC&pg=PA41 (1999), p. 41.
Manuel Monteiro de Castro (1938) secretary of the Congregation for Bishops
Euthanasia similar to Hitler’s racial purging, says Nuncio in Spain https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/12276/euthanasia-similar-to-hitlers-racial-purging-says-nuncio-in-spain (8 April 2008)
Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator
“She looked in the mirror and thought today
'What happened to miss no-longer-afraid?”
Kelly Clarkson (1982) American singer-songwriter, actress
Miss Independant
Lyrics, Thankful (2003)
J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer
"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí
Context: The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.
“What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.”
Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States
As quoted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1995) edited by Lawrence Sutin, p. x.
“One of the greatest writers of [the 20th] century.”
Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist
Arthur C. Clarke, quoted on the backcover of Time and the Gods, the second volume of the Fantasy Masterworks series
About
Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx
Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)
Context: The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint. Theatrical speech, Hamlet's speech before the theater of the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx's play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter's speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: "How goes the world?-It wears, sir, as it grows.
Gro Harlem Brundtland (1939) Norwegian politician
Awake! magazine 1999, 12/8, article: The Most Profound Changes.