Contemporary Quotes - Page 38

• One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

  Wendell Berry

  House, Conventions, Mailboxes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.40, Counterpoint Press

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• I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

  Toni Morrison

  Thinking, Past, Way

  "Toni Morrison's Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition". Book by Jan Furman, 2014.

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• Contemporary art hates you.

  John Waters

  Art, Hate, Hate You

  "And Your Family Too". Installation shot, Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, www.interviewmagazine.com. 2009.

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• Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.

  Karl Jaspers

  Men, Thinking, Primitive Man

  "Man in the Modern Age (Routledge Revivals)".

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• contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

  Nick Hornby

  War, Fighting, Reykjavik

  Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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• One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  People, Problem, Terrible

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.235, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Time, Air, Names

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• Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.

  Naomi Klein

  Iraq, Russia, Years

  Naomi Klein (2010). “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, p.455, Macmillan

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• [F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation.

  Nikolai Gogol

  Light, Soul, Depth

  Nikolai Gogol (2011). “Dead Souls: A Novel”, p.134, Vintage

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• The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

  Paul Johnson

  Powerful, Earth Day, Arrogance

  Paul Johnson (1980). “The Things that are Not Caesar's”

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• My dear young women, with all my heart I urge you not to look to contemporary culture for your role models and mentors. Please look to your faithful mothers for a pattern to follow. Model yourselves after them, not after celebrities whose standards are not the Lord's standards and whose values may not reflect an eternal perspective. Look to your mother.

  M. Russell Ballard

  Mother, Heart, Role Models

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• There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

  Rollo May

  Stronger, Culture, Definitions

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If there is one characteristic more than others that contemporary public worship needs to recapture it is this awe before the surpassingly great and gracious God.

  Henry Sloane Coffin

  Needs, Worship, Characteristics

  Henry Sloane Coffin (1946). “The Public Worship of God”

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• Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

  June Jordan

  Who I Am, America, Soul

  1969 'Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person', in the Evergreen Review, Oct.

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• The joyful news that He is risen does not change the contemporary world. Still before us lie work, discipline, sacrifice. But the fact of Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.

  Henry Knox Sherrill

  Spiritual, Easter, Life Changing

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• You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.

  Tadao Ando

  Thinking, Land, Use

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• It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.

  William James

  Philosophy, Facts, Philosopher

  "Some Problems of Philosophy".

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• With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.

  Jane Campion

  Stars, Sadness, Piano

  Interview with Scott Tobias, film.avclub.com. September 22, 2009.

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• The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Ideas, Trying

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.133, Pantheon

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• Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.

  Dean Koontz

  Power, Care, Culture

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.607, Bantam

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• A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is ourselves. '

  Claude Bernard

  Art, Science, Personality

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.71, Courier Corporation

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• Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.

  Adolf Hitler

  Mean, Science, Years

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• There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.

  Dan Barker

  Jesus, Men, Should Have

  Dan Barker (1992). “Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist”, Freedom from Religion Fndtn

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• In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to the Internet, read a newspaper or take a train without encountering it. Whether we are alone, with our friends or family, or in a crowd, advertising is always with us, if only on the label of something we are using.

  Guy Cook

  Mail, Watches, Labels

  Guy Cook (2001). “The Discourse of Advertising”, p.1, Psychology Press

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• Although contemporary advertising is relatively young, it already has a considerable tradition. Each new ad is encountered against a background of thousands of earlier ads.

  Guy Cook

  Advertising, Tradition, Young

  Guy Cook (2001). “The Discourse of Advertising”, p.6, Psychology Press

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