“[20th Century has been called] the century of extremes, […] in which human vices reached unfathomable depths. [She notes that it has been] a century of great progress [and in some places of] unprecedented economic growth. [At the same time, however, poor urban areas face a bleak future of] overcrowding and a disease pattern linked to poverty and an unhealthy environment.”

— Gro Harlem Brundtland

Awake! magazine 1999, 12/8, article: The Most Profound Changes.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Gro Harlem Brundtland 6

Norwegian politician 1939

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

“The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.”

Vernor Vinge (1944) American mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction writer

The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

“I believe that in the 20th century, humanity has learned from many, many experiences. Some positive, and many negative.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Interview in The New York Times (28 November 1993).
Context: I believe that in the 20th century, humanity has learned from many, many experiences. Some positive, and many negative. What misery, what destruction! The greatest number of human beings were killed in the two world wars of this century. But human nature is such that when we face a tremendous critical situation, the human mind can wake up and find some other alternative. That is a human capacity.

“It is time to reassess what has happened in the 20th century, and to look at it with a longer lens.”

Mixmaster Morris (1965) English ambient DJ

Modulations: A history of electronic music

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

Alex Carey (1922–1988) Australian psychologist

Source: Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (1995), p. 18

“This book will not take as its province all kinds of cultural growth — artistic, philosophical, military — but will try to shed some light on a narrower problem, namely, the reasons for economic growth and decline. The way wealth is distributed is a matter of special interest, partly because it may well be basic to growth in other cultural areas and partly because it has become so uneven in the past century that curiosity has been aroused.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 1

“The Modern Corporation has undermined the preconceptions of classic economic theory as effectively as the quantum undermined classic physics at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Gardiner C. Means (1896–1988) American economist

Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 287

“Keynes was no revolutionary, but his ideas revolutionized 20th-century economics.”

Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist

Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p.82

“The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world.”

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.

“Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

"What We Want," http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/09/22/what-we-want/ New York Review of Books, Septmber 22, 1966

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Gro Harlem Brundtland 6

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