Best Modern Quotes

Information is the oxygen of the modern age.

Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity… It’s not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.

Metal buildings are the dream that Modern Architects had at the beginning of this century. It has finally come true, but they themselves don’t realize it. That’s because it doesn’t take an Architect to build a metal building. You just order them out of a catalog – comes with a bunch of guys who put it together in a couple of days, maybe a week. And there you go – you’re all set to go into business – just slap a sign out front.

I’m proud to be Japanese and I wanted my country to succeed. I believed my system was a way that could help us become a modern industrial nation. That is why I had no problem with sharing it with other Japanese companies, even my biggest competitors.

No one is saying you’re possessed by the devil anymore except the most ignorant of people in modern culture.

I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.

We are not to expect perfection in this world; but mankind, in modern times, have apparently made some progress in the science of government.

It is certain that the Jew, if he desired-or if they were driven to it, as the antisemites seem to wish-could now have the ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe; that they are not working or planning for that end is equally sure… The resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary.

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

A modern teacher educates children to value their emotions.

Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn’t worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn’t have provoked so much opposition.

Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.

The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government.

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought… Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.

Little wonder that it can seem unthinkable to say no, thanks to the modern-day equivalent of our tribe – our fear-driven culture.

The drug of choice in the modern age is levity. We want everything to be light and bubbly. We just want to feel good.

In the modern operas that ‘Miss Saigon’ and ‘Les Miz’ are, nobody breaks out into song from conventional book dialogue. Everything is sung from beginning to end, including the recitative.

It has been a fortunate fact in the modern history of physical science that the scientist constructing a new theoretical system has nearly always found that the mathematics. . . required. . . had already been worked out by pure mathematicians for their own amusement. . . . The moral for statesmen would seem to be that, for proper scientific planning, pure mathematics should be endowed fifty years ahead of scientists.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.

Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

It’s hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn’t own water skis or a snorkel.

Some authors regard morality in the same light as we regard modern architecture. Convenience is the first thing to be looked for.

I disagree with the idea that modern dancers are cold or unemotional.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don’t build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

I think one of the serious breakdowns in modern evangelism is this: it has offered too much for too little. What we do mostly is offer forgiveness. We need cleansing! There is no true conversion until a man takes up his cross.

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.

It has become a cliché to announce that ‘we live in a remix culture’… What was referred to in post-modern times as quoting, appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs any special name. Now this is simlpy the basic logic of cultural production.

I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.

Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense – far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation – it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise.