Abhijit Banerjee
Abhijit Banerjee

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.

Adam Davidson
Adam Davidson

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

Adam Davidson
Adam Davidson

Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century.

Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Adrienne Mayor
Adrienne Mayor

The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.

Al Franken
Al Franken

Bill Clinton is the greatest president of the 20th century because I played touch football with him.

Al Gore
Al Gore

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan

Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It's very obvious that he's trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.

Alaya Dawn Johnson
Alaya Dawn Johnson

The trajectory of a lot of black lives in the 20th century was people moving into cities. A lot of the issue with modern urban fantasy is that it's un-diverse, and that's crazy with what we know the history of cities here to be.