Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Oscar Wilde
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day. Ron Chernow
Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals. Peter Ackroyd
Heroes are people who are all good with no bad in them. That's the way I always saw Joe DiMaggio. He was beyond question one of the greatest players of the century. Mickey Mantle
I am a curious creature and put my finger in as many cakes as I can: history, film, technology, etc. I'm also a freak for urban history, particularly Barcelona, Paris and New York. I know more weird stuff about 19th-century Manhattan than is probably healthy. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.Kareem Abdul Jabbar
I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.Neil Armstrong
I think 20th century media were about tricking people - and the beauty of the Internet is you can't lie anymore. Tucker Max
I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled. Ron Chernow
I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century. Michael Eric Dyson
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. Lynn Abbey
In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it. Martha Beck
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view. John Henrik Clarke
It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years. Harold Brodkey
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. Martin Amis
Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form. Margaret Atwood
Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time. Robertson Davies