Contemporary Quotes - Page 39

• To appeal to contemporary man to revert, in this twentieth century, to a pagan-like nature worship in order to restrain technology from further encroachment and devastation of the resources of nature, is a piece of atavistic nonsense.

  Norman Lamm

  Technology, Men, Order

  Seymour J. Cohen, Norman Lamm (1986). “Faith and doubt: studies in traditional Jewish thought”, Ktav Pub Inc

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• Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Integrity, Dry, Wonder

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• Now I do not myself share that superstitious reverence for the beliefs of common sense which many contemporary philosophers profess. But I think that we must start from them, and that we ought to depart from them only when we find good reason to do so.

  C. D. Broad

  Philosophical, Thinking, Common Sense

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• Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses

  Carl Jung

  Running, Spiritual, Men

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• Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered - one does not usually lead to the other - but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the 20th century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.

  Daniel D. Polsby

  Gun, Reality, Government

  "Armed against genocide" by Glenn Reynolds, www.theguardian.com. March 20, 2006.

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• "Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

  John Green

  Real, Thinking, Sky

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.299, A&C Black

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• Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Clerks, Energy, Roles

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• Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

  Ralph Ellison

  Music, Rocks, Expression

  "Some Questions and Some Answers", 1958.

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• Our world has changed for better or for worse. It is for us to find truth and beauty for today, constantly re-applying the truth of God's word to our own time and our contemporary situation.

  Hans Rookmaaker

  Art, Our World, Today

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• When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.

  Tim Winton

  Sports, Growing Up, Thinking

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• It is the misfortune of contemporary leaders, across the whole spectrum of Australian life, that the community's demand for strong leadership is growing in direct proportion to our lack of confidence in ourselves. The end of this century is an unusually difficult time to be a leader in Australia.

  Hugh Mackay

  Leadership, Strong, Australia

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• I don't know much about contemporary music. I do have an iPod but I listen to a lot of old blues. I listen to John Lee Hooker and Elmore James. I have been listening to them for years. I was obsessed with Van Morrison for years. I went to see him recently where he performed Astral Weeks. I just spent the entire night crying, but I was really obsessed with Van Morrison.

  Robert Pattinson

  Music, Night, Years

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• The contemporary artist...is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, 'The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,' is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see?

  Jerry Uelsmann

  Photography, Eye, Artist

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• Contemporary political theorists continue this type of thinking about democracy by arguing that the development of "public judgment" among regular citizens should be made the central concern of modern politics. Public judgment, in the words of Benjamin Barber, is a function of commonality that can be exercised only by citizens interacting with one another in the context of mutual deliberation and decision.

  Kevin Mattson

  Thinking, Decision, Political

  Kevin Mattson (1994). “Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era”, p.4, Penn State Press

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• This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Writing, Issues, Liberty

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• Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Women, People, Democracy

  Elizabeth Bishop (1962). “LIFE WORLD LIBRARY BRAZIL”

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• The best reason to be assigned, in this case, for not having made the Constitution more free from a charge of uncertainty in its meaning, is believed to be, that it was not suspected that any such charge would ever take place; and it appears that no such charge did take place, during the early period of the Constitution, when the meaning of its authors could be best ascertained, nor until many of the contemporary lights had in the lapse of time been extinguished. How often does it happen, that a notoriety of intention diminishes the caution against its being misunderstood or doubted!

  James Madison

  Light, Misunderstood, Doe

  James Madison (1884). “1816-1828”

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• It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.

  H. G. Wells

  Hate, Struggle, World Government

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• Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

  Erich Fromm

  Self, Ideas, Feelings

  ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

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• Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."

  Herbert Marcuse

  Real, Needs

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 9), 1964.

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• So in Jewry we recognise a contemporary universal anti-social phenomenon, which has reached its present pitch through a process of, historical development in which the Jews have zealously co-operated. And this evil anti-social aspect of Jewry has grown to a stage at which: it must necessarily collapse.

  Karl Marx

  Evil, Historical, Development

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• New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas.

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Affliction

  Sol LeWitt (2006). “Sol LeWitt wall drawing 1176: seven basic colors and all their combinations in a square within a square : for Josef Albers”, Richter Verlag

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• I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

  N. Scott Momaday

  Thinking, White, Sometimes

  "Pioneer of Modern Native American Literature". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

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• There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).

  Antonin Scalia

  Practice, Justice, Demand

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• I read very little contemporary anything.

  Alan Furst

  Littles

  "Spy novelist Alan Furst: 'I love the gray areas'" by Todd Leopold, www.cnn.com. December 4, 2001.

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