Quotes on Century

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry--he grokked that Eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing Now were identical.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

...The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

Tell me a story._x000D_ In this century, and moment, of mania,_x000D_ Tell me a story._x000D_ Make it a story of great distances, and starlight._x000D_ The name of the story will be Time,_x000D_ But you must not pronounce its name._x000D_ Tell me a story of deep delight.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.