Anachronism Quotes

• This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Age, Theater, Specialization

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• You do a James Bond film, you're being part of an anachronism, a tradition.

  Minnie Driver

  Ties, Film, Tradition

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• I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Boys, Smoking, Mind

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• A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Soldier

  George Bernard Shaw (1994). “John Bull's Other Island”, p.47, Penguin UK

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• The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

  George Orwell

  Religious, Spring, War

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

  Oscar Wilde

  Age

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.201, Wordsworth Editions

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• Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

  Oscar Wilde

  Greek, Facts, Modern

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.975, Wordsworth Editions

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• Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.

  John Dewey

  Independent, Self, People

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• Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Reality, Symmetry, Partiality

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• The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Genre Is, Literature, Demand

  Stanislaw Lem (2012). “Microworlds”, p.141, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One area of the Book of Mormon that does bother some is what they see as anachronistic doctrine; that the Book of Mormon has Christian doctrine prior to the coming of Christ; that it has seemingly New Testament doctrines appearing centuries before Jesus arrives, and it seems to be representing a form of Christianity existing in the New World where there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that archaeologically. Christianity is invisible in the New World prior to the coming of Columbus, and so those things seem like clear anachronisms to people looking at it in that way.

  Daniel C. Peterson

  Christian, Jesus, Honesty

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• When you stroll through Munich it can happen that you suddenly stand in front of an old house, an idyllically-dreaming church that smiles like a friendly anachronism into our modern time.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Dream, House, Church

  "Michael: a German fate in diary notes". Book by Joseph Goebbels, 1926.

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• When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

  Louis Sullivan

  Fashion, Civilization, Historical

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• After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Korea, Cuba, Lasts

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• The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears….

  Arthur Koestler

  Betrayal, Hands, Voice

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• If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history -- a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils -- people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. '

  Daniel Quinn

  Mother, Past, Two

  Daniel Quinn (2009). “Ishmael: A Novel”, p.42, Bantam

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• If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

  Ben Lerner

  Practice, Admitting, Kind

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.58, Granta Books

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• I hope people will remember me as one who did her best - and who wasn't an anachronism.

  Margrethe II of Denmark

  People, Denmark, Remember

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• Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.

  Ransom Riggs

  Eye, Hair, People

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• When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.

  Andy Warhol

  Believe, Pregnancy, People

  Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.131, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Dog, Literature, World

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.48, 谷月社

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• Dignity is an anachronism.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Dignity

  Ellen Glasgow, (2013). “In This Our Life”, p.8, Read Books Ltd

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• One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

  Lev Grossman

  Country, Writing, Practice

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• Obama is already setting a new historic course by reorienting the economy from private consumption to public investments... Rightwing pundits bemoan the evident intention of Obama and team to 'tell us what kind of car to drive'. Yet that is exactly what they intend to do...and rightly so. Free-market ideology is an anachronism in an era of climate change.

  Jeffrey Sachs

  Team, Car, Climate

  "Rewriting the rulebook for 21st-century capitalism" by Jeffrey Sachs, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2009.

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