1920s

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

1925

★ 9.1

Interview · Newspaper

Because it's there.

George Mallory

The New York Times · 1923

★ 9.0

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming · 1920

★ 8.9

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby · 1925

★ 7.3

Essay

A house is a machine for living in.

Le Corbusier

Toward an Architecture · 1923

★ 7.2

The great question that has never been answered…is what does a woman want?

Sigmund Freud

1925

★ 7.1

Philosophical literature

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus · 1921

★ 7.1

Political literature

A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture... A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Mao Zedong

1927

★ 7.0

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen" Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes

I, Too · 1926

★ 7.0

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

You ain't heard nothing yet.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 7.0

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

Jakie Rabinowitz

The Jazz Singer · 1927

★ 7.0

Economic literature

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

John Maynard Keynes

1924

★ 6.9

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

Willa Cather

The Professor's House · 1925

★ 6.9

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue · 1927

★ 6.9

Play

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw

1921

★ 6.9

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Dissenting opinion · Legal writing

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Louis Brandeis

Olmstead v. United States · 1928

★ 6.9

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

D.H. Lawrence

1929

★ 6.9

That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby · 1925

★ 6.4

Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom.

Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha · 1922

★ 6.2

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 6.1

Essay

Jose Ortega y Gasset

1925

★ 6.1

Political literature

The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

H.L. Mencken

Notes on Democracy · 1926

★ 6.1

Are you lost daddy I asked tenderly. Shut up he explained.

Ring Lardner

1920

★ 6.0

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

John A. Shedd

Salt from My Attic · 1928

★ 6.0

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1920

★ 6.0

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century beings it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain · 1924

★ 6.0

Interview

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Nikola Tesla

1926

★ 6.0

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

United States v. Schwimmer · 1929

★ 6.0

Lecture

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

William Ralph Inge

The Idea of Progress · 1920

★ 5.9

Political literature

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged... On account of sex.

1920

★ 5.5

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 5.5

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby · 1925

★ 5.5

Novel · War novel

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Ernest Hemingway

1929

★ 5.5

Courtroom speech · Speech

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, non-cooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evildoer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiples evil and that evil can only be sustained by violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

1922

★ 5.4

Autobiography and memoir

The great masses of the people...more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one.

Adolf Hitler

Mein Kampf · 1925

★ 5.4

Novel · Satire

What is Love?... It is the morning and the evening star.

Sinclair Lewis

1927

★ 5.4

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

1921

★ 5.3

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

In Search of Lost Time · 1921

★ 5.3