We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more but the number is roughly constant and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation the resurrection life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed there is no justice but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two some century or two but it is sure as life it is sure as death.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Rosa Parks' courage determination and tenacity continue to be an inspiration to all those committed to non-violent protest and change nearly half a century later.

Although the war in which you fought took place more than half-a-century ago your courage your sacrifice and your patriotism reaches through the decades and inspires us today.

Basically after an ABC sitcom I did I ended up with a holding deal with 20th Century Fox. Absolutely cool. It pays you to be unemployed. And the bigger the entity that gives you the deal the better.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

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.

Today in America we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years.

I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st century.

It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient more transparent and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

In the 19th century you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

But the beauty of Einstein's equations for example is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

During the 80s and 90s we all became consumed with ourselves. In the 21st century we've come back to simpler times. People are struggling economically and this has forced them to scale back the material aspects of their lives and realise the beauty of finding the simple joy in being with the people we love.

I was very much into buying contemporary art but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art but all of a sudden my mood has changed and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

To be honest I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form.

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then like any great place it collapsed and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

At the beginning of the 20th century the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music which was then considered as the noblest art.

Film in the 20th century it's the American art form like jazz.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.