Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.
“Two world wars have destroyed in a few years the material and spiritual capital accumulated by centuries of work. The nineteenth century had hoped to turn man, by virtue of education, into a reasoning being: a half-century of ferocity has proved that a cruel, primitive beast still resides in him.”
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving
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André Maurois 202
French writer 1885–1967Related quotes
Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism
Centennial Oration (4 July 1876) http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/centennial_oration.html
Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XIX, Modern Civil Procedure, p. 360
A Spanish politician in a political meeting said it for the first time and attributed to Bismarck https://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discusi%C3%B3n:Otto_von_Bismarck
Misattributed
“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)
Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 8 : Thought
“The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.”
Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VII, p. 254