Modern Quotes - Page 18

• I don't like super-descriptive modern fiction. I like, "Here's what was happening in 1582 all over the planet." Then that gets my imagination going.

  Andrew Bird

  Imagination, Fiction, Planets

  Interview with Genevieve Koski, music.avclub.com. January 20, 2009.

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• One of the problems of our modern world is that there's a lot of things to work through, but, at some point, everybody should take a pause from that and make something, so that it's not just all one-way traffic.

  Jarvis Cocker

  World, Way, Problem

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. November 21, 2014.

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• We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

  Edward Abbey

  Suicide, Book, Home

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• I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.

  Taika Waititi

  Hate, Kids, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

  William Eggleston

  Art, Museums, Color

  Interview with Harmony Korine, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 21, 2008.

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• An hour of study, for the modern apostle, is an hour of prayer.

  Josemaria Escriva

  Prayer, Study, Hours

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• I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

  Terry Gilliam

  World, Bases, Clinicals

  Source: collider.com

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• Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.

  Pete Townshend

  Data, Doe, World

  Interview with Rob Mitchum, pitchfork.com. October 16, 2006.

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• We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent.

  Karen Armstrong

  Wise, Christian, Intelligent

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.

  Karen Armstrong

  Thinking, Likes And Dislikes, Bigger And Better

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Thinking, Done

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays”, p.11, Psychology Press

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• Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.

  George Orwell

  Fighting, Thinking, Political

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.157, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Modern minds no longer object to the Church because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no longer have difficulties with the Creed, but with her Commandments. The heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, but of action.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Thinking, Mind, Church

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• Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Men, Views, Practice

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• A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Culture, May, Neurosis

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

  George Orwell

  Warfare, Machines, Use

  George Orwell (1963). “George Orwell's 1984”, p.60, Dramatic Publishing

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• The sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.

  Karel Capek

  Civilization, Perfect, Machines

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• The problem of modern democracy is rooted in its neglect of unorganized people.

  William Greider

  People, Democracy, Problem

  William Greider (2010). “Who Will Tell The People: The Betrayal Of American Democracy”, p.104, Simon and Schuster

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• Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

  Michel Foucault

  Hypocrisy, Facts, Spite

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.47, Vintage

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• The church lives on the fact that modern research about Jesus is not known amongst the public.

  Hans Conzelmann

  Jesus, Church, Research

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• The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

  Mary Schmich

  Phones, Cells, Skills

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• Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Leader, Visionaries, Occupation

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• In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Book, Order, Land

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• Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Dog, Cat, America

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• In the desert you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life. You discover your kinship with nature and man, which is evoked by the naturalness and the gentle humanity of the natives of the desert, and you will also discover God.

  Ameen Rihani

  Men, Humanity, Over You

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