Contemporary Quotes - Page 8

• Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art?

  Brassai

  Beauty, Art, Men

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• Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Atheism, Taste, Language

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• There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.

  Amartya Sen

  World, Social, Women's Education

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• Nothing is more dangerous than to live out the will of God in today's contemporary world. It changes your whole monetary lifestyle...Let me put it quite simply: If Jesus had $40,000 and knew about the kids who are suffering and dying in Haiti, what kind of car would he buy?

  Tony Campolo

  Jesus, Kids, Car

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• Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency.

  Mary Travers

  Song, Wind, Jail

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• The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year.

  Steve Martin

  Art, Thinking, Years

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• The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Order, Mind

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

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• Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary.

  Jeff Goldblum

  Fiction, Noir

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Vocabulary, Astrology, Psychology

  "Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick: Revised Edition". Book by Peter J. Carroll, 1995.

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• To be a Christian is to be a theologian-a student of God and his will. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church.

  R. C. Sproul

  Christian, Apostolic Church, Self

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• In my book, the Arab Awakening, I talk about the fact that we have to move from this. All the contemporary ideologies of political Islam have been based on the nation state. The nation state is very problematic but I'm not sure if we have an alternative political model.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Moving, Book, Political

  Source: dinmerican.wordpress.com

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• I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.

  Mike Leigh

  Girl, Sexy, Hate

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Dream, Sweet, Art

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• Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.

  Frank Wedekind

  Kitsch, Gothic, Form

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• I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don't know how much experience you've had with contemporary Hebrew. It's quite difficult.

  Noam Chomsky

  Reading, Hebrew, Trouble

  Interview with David Samuels, chomsky.info. November 12, 2010.

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• Oh God almighty, another Detroit monster is Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. Their music is intoxicating between Flea and Chad Smith. They're contemporary because they're still making good records, but I don't think there's anything new that has a groove and soulfulness. The Chili Peppers just stink of soul-and that's the ultimate compliment. They continue what James Brown created.

  Ted Nugent

  Thinking, Soul, Monsters

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• Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way.Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our current situation? Because our current situation may not be critiqued. We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so.Why is modern China lacking in great writers? Because all the great writers are castrated while still in the nursery.

  Murong Xuecun

  Nurse, May, Way

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• People are probably correct when they see me as the so-called Everyman. I'm attracted primarily to contemporary characters. I understand them and their frustrations.

  Jack Lemmon

  Character, Frustration, People

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• I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is.

  Ang Lee

  Distance, Thinking, Pieces

  "TalkAsia" with Andrew Stevens, www.cnn.com. October 26, 2007.

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• In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Lincoln Center, Play, Diversity

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• As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.

  Lech Walesa

  Responsibility, Fate, Doe

  Lech Walesa's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1983.

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• I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

  Vera Wang

  Art, New York, School

  "Bridget Foley’s Diary: Vera’s Vision". Interview with Bridget Foley, wwd.com. June 3, 2013.

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• I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

  Anne Waldman

  Roles, Kind, Poet

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Music, Growth, Ears

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• Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

  W. H. Auden

  Science, Wish, Events

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