Modern Life Quotes - Page 11

• The subject [of Los Angeles] became a general metaphor for anxiety and the speed of modern life.

  Edward Ruscha

  Anxiety, Speed, Los Angeles

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• Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium... Photograph and be photographed.

  Alexander Rodchenko

  Beautiful, Art, War

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• Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Elements, Sin

  Oscar Wilde (2010). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.33, Bibliolis Books

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• Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Life, Change, Travel

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• We are in danger of developing a cult of the Common Man, which means a cult of mediocrity.

  Herbert Hoover

  Mean, Men, Mediocrity

  Herbert Hoover (1938). “Addresses upon the American road”, C. Scribner's sons

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• When I fly, I'm never afraid the plane is going to crash. But there have often been times when I was afraid it wouldn't crash. I was just afraid it was going to circle O'Hare for the rest of my life.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Circles, Crash, Planes

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• Why take pride in cooking, when they don't take pride in eating?

  Erma Bombeck

  Pride, Cooking, Eating

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• We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Would Be, England, Worship

  P. J. O'Rourke (2016). “Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of . . .”, p.94, Pan Macmillan

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• The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  People, Gardening, Want

  P. J. O'Rourke (2016). “Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of . . .”, p.94, Pan Macmillan

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• This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Safe, Predictions, Happened

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• The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

  H. L. Mencken

  Primates, Peasants, Moron

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• One way to solve the traffic problem is to keep all the cars that are not paid for off the streets.

  Will Rogers

  Car, Way, Problem

  Will Rogers (1961). “The Will Rogers Book”

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• The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Baptists, Firsts

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• As the horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rises, the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the average possible speed of your car. This is known as Progress.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Average, Car, Progress

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• Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.

  Will Rogers

  Writing, Trying, Crafts

  "The Lawyers Talking" (1935)

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• We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.

  Walter Cronkite

  Rooms, Telephones, Bars

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• America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station, and to do it within a decade.

  Ronald Reagan

  Dream, Stars, Greatness

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1984). “Ronald Reagan”

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• The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive - such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.

  Thomas Sowell

  Welfare Programs, People, Way

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• The good old horse-and-buggy days: then you lived until you died and not until you were run over.

  Will Rogers

  Running, Horse, Died

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• Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.

  Lance Morrow

  Moving, Years, Goal

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• If you ask which of the scenarios I think is most dangerous, though, I will give a different answer. In that form of the question, I regard a nuclear attack, terrorist-generated or otherwise, as the most threatening combination of likelihood and long-term damage to modern life today.

  John L. Casti

  Thinking, Long, Giving

  Source: bigthink.com

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• There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society.

  Lauren Groff

  Giving Up, School, Kids

  "Bit And Peace: Lauren Groff’s Arcadia". Interview with Clare Stein, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 8, 2012.

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• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

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• The man who called it "near beer" was a bad judge of distance.

  Philander Chase Johnson

  Distance, Beer, Men

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• We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

  Erica Jong

  War, Men, Two

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