“These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.”

— Robert Charles Wilson , book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 29

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“Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

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“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.”

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“Europe needs an army to fight the resource wars of the twenty-first century.”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Variations of this have circulated among Irish and left-wing Eurosceptic groups. Delors explicitly denied making any such statement in 1992 and 1998 in the leadup to Irish referendums on the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties. Commentators have found no evidence for it.
Attributions:
[Facing the threat of Brussels rule at our expense, https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1991/1121/Pg014.html#Ar01400, 30 July 2019, The Irish Times, 21 November 1991, 14, subscription, Anthony, Coughlan]
[Proinsias, de Rossa, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1991-11-29/3/#para_191, 29 November 1991, Dáil Éireann debates, Maastricht Summit: Motion]
[Maastricht and neutrality : Ireland's neutrality and the future of Europe, John, Maguire, Joe, Noonan, 1992, Cork, People First/Meitheal, 19–20]
[Fox, Carol, Gearing up, 25554848, Fortnight, 1994, 334, 11–12: 12, 0141-7762]
[Joe, Higgins, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1997-10-16/24/#para_608, 16 October 1997, Dáil Éireann debates, Amsterdam Treaty: Statements (Resumed)]
Edward, Spalton, 4 July 2004, (Letter) Fashion statement, Daily Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3608033/Fashion-statement.html,
John, Boyd, Campaign Against European Federalism, Europe for Peace Conference, Manchester, 5 March 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20070809083941/http://www.gmdcnd.org.uk/events/europeconference/amC.htm,
[Gibson, Dirk C., Commercial Space Tourism: Impediments to Industrial Development and Strategic Communication Solutions, 2012, Bentham Science Publishers, 9781608052394, 12, https://books.google.ie/books?id=hSkW9TW3omEC&pg=PA12, 21 July 2019]
The European Alliance of EU-critical Movements, EU Counter Summit Statement, London, 7 November 2015 http://teameurope.co/statements.html,
[The financial cost of signing up to PESCO, https://people.ie/news/PN-178.pdf, People's News, People's Movement, Dublin, 178, 20 December 2017]
Morning Star, Macron calls for joint EU army project to step up a gear, 27 August 2018 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/macron-calls-joint-eu-army-project-step-gear,
Refutations:
The Irish Times, subscription, 12 June 1992, 12, Colm, Boland, 'Interference' by Delors denounced https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1992/0612/Pg007.html#Ar00701,
[30001811, Ireland's Foreign Relations in 1992, Patrick, Keatinge, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 4, 1993, 72 [footnote]]
McKenna's case not a Euromyth, 15 May 1998, Patrick, Smyth, The Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/news/mckenna-s-case-not-a-euromyth-1.152890,
Misattributed

“Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.”

Joe Haldeman book Mindbridge

Source: Mindbridge (1976), Chapter 8 “Geoformy 1” (p. 33)

“I was very interested in the Great War, as it was called then, because it was the initial twentieth-century shock to European culture.”

Paul Fussell (1924–2012) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Humanities interview (1996)
Context: I was very interested in the Great War, as it was called then, because it was the initial twentieth-century shock to European culture. By the time we got to the Second World War, everybody was more or less used to Europe being badly treated and people being killed in multitudes. The Great War introduced those themes to Western culture, and therefore it was an immense intellectual and cultural and social shock.
Robert Sherwood, who used to write speeches for Franklin D. Roosevelt, once noted that the cynicism about the Second War began before the firing of the first shot. By that time, we didn't need to be told by people like Remarque and Siegfried Sassoon how nasty war was. We knew that already, and we just had to pursue it in a sort of controlled despair. It didn't have the ironic shock value of the Great War.
And I chose to write about Britain because America was in that war a very, very little time compared to the British — just a few months, actually. The British were in it for four years, and it virtually destroyed British society.

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