Modern World Quotes - Page 11

The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history -- the English, the French and the Russian -- all took place in societies where the rate of literacy was approaching 50 per cent. Literacy had a profound effect on the peasant mind and community. It promotes abstract thought and enables the peasant to master new skills and technologies, Which in turn helps him to accept the concept of progress that fuels change in the modern world.

Orlando Figes

Technology, Skills, Profound

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Who knows what hellish future lies ahead? ... Actually, I do. I've seen the rehearsals.

Terry Wogan

Lying, America, World

"Stars pay tribute to Terry Wogan at Westminster Abbey thanksgiving". www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2016.

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But we live in a modern world, you know, and, and also it does seem to me that if you - that whatever talents you have, it... I mean it may sound a bit absurd but I, I think it's your, absolutely your duty to resolve them, you know?

Tim Curry

Mean, Thinking, Aries Man

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It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

Don Cheadle

Real, Past, Thinking

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There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase - the pursuit of happiness - is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Happiness, People, Phrases

"Woman's Hour" on the BBC, October 05, 1965.

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Only if you have some knowledge of the human sacrifices, the vicious temple rites, the degrading superstitions and customs that were practiced . . . can you realize how much the modern world owes to the Hebrew prophets, whose monotheism and moral teachings entered into Christianity and Islam.

Carlton J. H. Hayes

Teaching, Sacrifice, Islam

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...it would be a mistake...to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew.

Woodrow Wilson

Mistake, Eye, Men

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Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

Ernest Van den Haag

Men, Thinking, Names

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It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. . . . It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.

Herbert Butterfield

Real, Science, Historical

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Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Risk, Caves, Research

"Learning to Expect the Unexpected" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, www.edge.org. April 19, 2004.

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Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together.

Cecil B. DeMille

Religious, Laughter, War

"Cecil B. DeMille's Campaign for a Godly Culture" by Mark H. Creech, www.christianpost.com. September 9, 2013.

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Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Charles Frazier

Attitude, Black, Style

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The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.

Jared Diamond

Epidemics, World, Modern

Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.11, W. W. Norton & Company

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But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.

Julius Evola

Religious, Weakness, Prejudice

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The modern world’s tech-giddy control and facilitation makes us stupid. Awareness atrophies. Dumb gets dumber. Lists are everywhere – the five things you need to know about so-and-so; the eight essential qualities of such-and-such; the 11 delights of somewhere or other. We demand shortcuts, as if there are shortcuts to genuine experiences. These lists are meaningless.

Roger Cohen

Stupid, Eight, Dumb

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To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.

Jerry Seinfeld

Country, Moving, Games

"SeinLanguage" by Jerry Seinfeld, New York: Bantam, (p. 90), 1993.

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Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.

Havelock Ellis

Religious, Jesus, Careers

Impressions and Comments 5 January (1922)

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My motto is, 'What's the hurry?' I'm trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.

Joe Strummer

Thinking, Trying, Needs

Interview with Corey Levitan, Rolling Stone Online, December 02, 1999.

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The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christian, Sorry, Mad

Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christian, Religious, Evil

Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men, Two, People

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Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life.

Eugene H. Peterson

Christian, Spiritual, Brother

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The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.

Immanuel Wallerstein

Imagination, Together, World

Immanuel Wallerstein (2011). “The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, With a New Prologue”, p.357, Univ of California Press

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The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Chris Hedges

Self, Color, Doubt

Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.147, PublicAffairs

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While many people like the idea of exercising unconditional love, most eventually find it too draining and impossible to sustain, often because the attempt to practice it is misunderstood, discouraged, brought under attack, or made a target of willful abuse. As sad as it may be to admit, in our modern world people are far more accustomed to hearing news of war, genocide, murder, disasters, famine, and disease than they are to hearing anything about acts of love or grace.

Aberjhani

Love, War, Exercise

Aberjhani (2014). “Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry”, p.60, Lulu.com

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