Modern Quotes - Page 8

• Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").

  Harriet Lerner

  Mother, Home, Ambition

  Harriet Goldhor Lerner (1993). “The Dance of Deception: Pretending and Truth-Telling in Women's Lives”, Harpercollins

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• There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Real, Italian

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• God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Father, Fate, Tragedy

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• The passion of fear (as a modern philosopher informs me) determines the spirits of the muscles of the knees, which are instantly ready to perform their motion, by taking up the legs with incomparable celerity, in order to remove the body out of harm's way.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Fear, Passion, Order

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• Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

  Charles William Eliot

  Education, Honor, World

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• Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Views, Ideas, Common Sense

  "Against Method". Book by Paul Feyerabend, 1975.

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• Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

  Moses Finley

  Ignorance, Discovery, Democracy

  Moses I. Finley (1973). “Democracy ancient and modern”

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• The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.

  William Wickenden

  Faith, Men, Essence

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• I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things

  Albert Einstein

  Two, Soul, Body

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.152, Princeton University Press

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• Modern American marriage is like a wire fence. The woman's the wire -the posts are the husband's.

  Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

  Marriage, Husband, Wire

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• The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present. ...but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.

  John Reader

  Men, Convincing Evidence, Missing

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• It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image

  Kenneth Cloke

  Exercise, Organization, Voice

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• The surest way to get a job done is to give it to a busy man. He'll have his secretary do it.

  Jacob Braude

  Jobs, Men, Giving

  Jacob Morton Braude (1966). “Speaker's desk book of quips, quotes, & anecdotes”

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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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• The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern.  But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.

  Ken Wilber

  Vision, World, Demand

  Ken Wilber (2001). “The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad”, p.53, Shambhala Publications

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• As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting a compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, College, Progress

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.84

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• Full of wise saws and modern instances.

  William Shakespeare

  Wise, Saws, You Like It

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 7, l. 139

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• There is no patent recipe for getting good citizenship. You get it by applying the old, old rules of decent conduct, the rules in accordance with which decent men have had to shape their lives from the beginning .. fundamental precepts, put forth in the Bible and embodied consciously or unconsciously in the code of morals of every great and successful nation from antiquity to modern times.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Successful, Men, Patents

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• The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

  Umberto Eco

  Age, Enlightenment, Reason

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• In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Song, Morning, Reading

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.275, Delphi Classics

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• I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.

  Mark Rippetoe

  Brother, Chicago, Towers

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• The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Book, Character

  Henry David Thoreau (1939). “Walden: or, Life in the woods”

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• ...I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Eye, Two, Feet

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2010). “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts”, p.57, Vintage

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• The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.

  Michael Pollan

  War, Protein, Fats

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.30, Penguin

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• Sports (and the often barely withheld violence around them) have become one of the few modern ways to connect with strangers. They give an amazing number of geeks things to talk about. In the old days we settled for, "Hello, how are you?

  Perry Brass

  Sports, Numbers, Giving

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.28, Perry Brass

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