Modern Times Quotes - Page 2

• For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Writing, Years

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• Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.

  Kage Baker

  Mistake, Hate, Technology

  Kage Baker (2005). “In the Garden of Iden”, p.217, Macmillan

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• One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Memorable, Television, Modern

  Kurt Vonnegut (2013). “If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young”, p.52, RosettaBooks

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• The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

  Tom Stoppard

  Philosophy, Self, People

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• Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Plato, Believe, Book

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• The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

  David Elkind

  Children, Writing, Ideas

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• The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.

  Philippe Aries

  Strength, Music, Hero

  Philippe Ariès (1962). “Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life”, Vintage

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• How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Law, Progress

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

  Victor Hugo

  Drama, Epic, History

  Victor Hugo (1909). “The Works of Victor Hugo ...”

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• "True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Latin, Hands, Two

  "Isis Unveiled". Book by Helena Blavatsky. Volume I, Chapter VII, 1877.

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• Defeatism about the feasibility of plans for disarmament and ordered peace has been the most calamitious of all the errors made by democratic governments in modern times.

  Philip Noel-Baker, Baron Noel-Baker

  Peace, Errors, Government

  "The Arms Race". Book by Philip Noel-Baker, 1958.

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• The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.

  Margaret Sanger

  Sex, Motherhood, Important

  Margaret Sanger (2005). “Woman and the New Race”, p.1, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime.

  S. S. Van Dine

  Book, Unique, Men

  S.S. Van Dine (1956). “The Greene Murder Case”

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• Nowadays, the practice of yoga stops with just asanas. Very few even attempt dharana and dhyana (deeper meditation) with seriousness. There is a need to search once more and reestablish the practice and value of yoga in modern times.

  Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

  Yoga, Practice, Meditation

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• The institution of representative government to us seems an essential part of democracy, but the ancients never thought of it. Its immense merit was that it enabled a large constituency to exert indirect power, and thus made possible the distribution of political responsibility throughout the great states of modern times.

  Bertrand Russell

  Responsibility, Government, Political

  Bertrand Russell (1993). “The Quotable Bertrand Russell”

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• Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.

  Julian Assange

  Intellectual, Records, Treasure

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• Pickover's lively, provocative travel guide takes readers into the fascinating realm of mystic math, from perfectly strange numbers to fractured geometries and other curious nooks and crannies of ancient worlds and modern times.

  Ivars Peterson

  Math, Numbers, World

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• For the first time in history, Congress has 100 women in it. Congratulations. Welcome to modern times, America. It's great having 100 women in Congress. Unless you're in line for the congressional bathroom.

  Craig Ferguson

  Congratulations, America, Lines

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• To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow.

  Ricardo Semler

  Successful, Quality, Firsts

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• We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.

  E. Haldeman-Julius

  Practice, Atheism, Influence

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• starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.

  Pearl S. Buck

  World, Unnecessary, Hunger

  Pearl S. Buck (2013). “God's Men: A Novel”, p.7, Open Road Media

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• We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Sparta, Athens, Modern

  Rita Mae Brown (1987). “Poems”

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• The curse of modern times is, that almost everything does create controversy.

  Horace Walpole

  Doe, Modern, Curse

  Horace Walpole, John Wright, George Agar-Ellis Dover (1st baron) (1840). “The letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford: including numerous letters now first published from the original manuscripts”, p.267

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• Love in modern times has been the tailor's best friend. Every suitor of the nineteenth century spends more than his spare cash on personal adornment. A faultless fit, a glistening hat, tight gloves, and tighter boots proclaim the imminent peril of his position.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Cash, Tailors, Hats

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• For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to take names in vain. Caste and all its subclassifications are recreated every day in the structure of a conversation that knows which names to name.

  Sara Suleri

  Names, People, Would Be

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