Modern Man Quotes - Page 4

• Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

  Edward R. Murrow

  Men, Fire, Discovery

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• Seek above all for a game worth playing- such is the advice of the oracle to modern man.

  Robert S. de Ropp

  Men, Games, Advice

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• The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.

  Neel Burton

  Dream, Men, Historical

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• Neckties satisfy modern man's desire to dress in art.

  Harry Anderson

  Art, Men, Desire

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• Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air

  Francis Schaeffer

  Men, Air, Feet

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• When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem

  Ernest Becker

  Religious, Real, Men

  Ernest Becker (1997). “The Denial of Death”, p.166, Simon and Schuster

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• At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Men, Self, Might

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• Modern man is a hard-working human.

  Ed Wood

  Hard Work, Men, Modern

  "Fictional character: Dr. Alton/Narrator". "Glen or Glenda", 1953.

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• Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.

  Nicolas Gomez Davila

  Wall, Freedom, Men

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• Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history - the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of heathens, and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere - modern man is filled with pride in the progress accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism.

  Savitri Devi

  Christian, Religious, Dark

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• Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Want, Illusion

  Erich Fromm (1950). “The Fear of Freedom”

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• Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.

  Walter Lippmann

  Past, Men, Records

  Walter Lippmann, Julien C. Sprott (2015). “Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest”, p.163, University of Wisconsin Pres

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• More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
  I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.

  Woody Allen

  Men, Healthy, Despair

  Side Effects "My Speech to the Graduates" (1980)

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• Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

  Erich Fromm

  Happiness, Men, Thrill

  Erich Fromm (2000). “The Art of Loving: The Centennial Edition”, p.3, A&C Black

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• Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Heaven, Vision

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Sane Society Ils 252”, p.135, Routledge

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• Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

  Arthur Koestler

  Silly, Men, Civilization

  Arthur Koestler (1955). “The trail of the dinosaur & other essays”

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• Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

  Aldous Huxley

  Sacrifice, Men, Reflection

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

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• Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.

  George Will

  Powerful, Men, Humanity

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• Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.

  Thomas Merton

  Believe, Men, Ego

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.27, Macmillan

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• Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

  Alberto Moravia

  Mean, Men, World

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• The modern man, finding that Humanism and Sex both fail to satisfy, seeks his happiness in Science ... But Science fails too, for it is something more than a knowledge of matter the soul craves.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Sex, Science, Men

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• I'm carrying the weight of all the useless junk and modern man accumulates.

  Billy Joel

  Reality, Men, Junk

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• Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

  Russell Kirk

  Loneliness, Pride, Men

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.41, Regnery Publishing

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• Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Fellow Man, Commodity

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.88, Open Road Media

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• Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Plato, Men, Understanding Nature

  "Writings on Physics and Philosophy" by Wolfgang Pauli, (p. 142), 1994.

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