Browsing Topic Best Modern Quotes

They [NATO] will chat endlessly, speak endlessly about the need to negotiate, and do nothing, except pumping up our neighbour [Ukraine] with modern weapons systems, and increase the threat to Russia, with which we will then be forced to somehow deal with, somehow live.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age.

The most dangerous tendency of the modern world is the way in which bogus theories are given the force of dogma.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.

Modern life … is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death–in a cesspool.

Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society… Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Our modern Western culture only recognises the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constituitions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people’s freedom to realise their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires.

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source. Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than a half century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.

Nothing matters more to AA’s future welfare than the manner in which we use the colossus of modern communication. Used unselfishly and well, it can produce results surpassing our present imagination.

I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things

The Scriptures contain many stories of people who waited years or even decades before the Lord’s promises came to pass. What modern believers can learn from the patience of biblical saints like Abraham, Joseph, David, and Paul is that waiting upon the Lord has eternal rewards.

Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side

The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution.

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

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

So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations, that every war must appear to be a war of defence against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate. Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier.

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

The liberated woman is not that modern doll who wears make-up and tasteless clothes. ….The liberation woman is a person who believes that she is as human as a man. The liberated woman does not insist on her freedom so as to abuse it.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt…None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word…Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

It is the fate of modern life that we repeatedly lose touch with nature, the environment, the planet. But we try to regain it again and again. It’s like a circle. In children’s hearts and souls when they’re born into the world, nature already exists deep inside them. So what I want to do in my work is tap into their souls

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don’t… you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son.

You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.

Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.

The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples – not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area – they’re worse than witchcraft, really.

Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbor.

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.

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