Modern World Quotes - Page 12

• The modern world, a world which has experienced marvelous achievements but which seems to have lost its sense of ultimate realities and of existence itself.

  Pope John Paul II

  Faith, Inspiration, Reality

  Pope John Paul II (1996). “The Encyclicals of John Paul II”, Our Sunday Visitor (IN)

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• Loneliness is the leprosy of the modern world.

  Mother Teresa

  Loneliness, Leprosy, World

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• I think that if a real princess was lost in this modern world and she could be whatever she wanted, she would be a musician,' Blanche said slowly. 'A violinist, or a harpist. That would be the only place where she could find solace for her lost kingdom.

  Regina Doman

  Real, Princess, Thinking

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• The notion of freedom proclaimed by the modern world is anti-discipline. But true freedom cannot be separated from discipline.

  Matthew Kelly

  Discipline, World, Modern

  Matthew Kelly (2003). “Rediscovering Catholicism: Journeying Toward Our Spiritual North Star”, p.224, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing

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• Superficiality is the curse of the modern world.

  Matthew Kelly

  World, Modern, Curse

  Matthew Kelly (2002). “Rediscover Catholicism: A Spiritual Guide to Living with Passion & Purpose”, p.71, BookBaby

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• We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.

  Dave Barry

  Country, Scotland, America

  Dave Barry (1991). “Dave Barry's guide to life”, Random House Value Publishing

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• I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Zoos, Thinking, Echoes

  Michel Houellebecq (2006). “The Possibility of an Island”, p.148, Vintage

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• Atlantis: Fabled. Mystical. Golden. Mysterious. Glorious and magical. There are those who claim that it never was. But then there are also those who think they are safe in this modern world of technology and weapons. Safe from all the ancient evils. They even believe that wizards, warriors, and dragons are long dead. They are fools clinging to their science and logic while thinking it will save them. (Thrylos)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Believe, Warrior, Technology

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2010). “Kiss of the Night”, p.1, Macmillan

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• Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Order, Two, Choices

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.345, A&C Black

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• In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Morning, Philosophy, Gita

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Walden: Life in the Woods”, p.184, Gibbs Smith

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• In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been--it may even be greater--for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.

  Margaret Wise Brown

  Song, Children, Childhood

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• Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.

  Bertrand Russell

  Use, World, Moral

  Bertrand Russell (1960). “Sceptical Essays”

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• One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

  Regina Doman

  Hero, Adventure, Boys

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• I imagine that the goddess of Love has come down from Olympus to visit a mortal. So as not to die of cold in this modern world of ours, she wraps her sublime body in great heavy furs and warms her feet on the prostrate body of her lover. I imagine the favorite of this beautiful despot, who is whipped when his mistress grows tired of kissing him, and whose love only grows more intense the more he is trampled underfoot. I shall call the picture "Venus in Furs

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

  Beautiful, Tired, Kissing

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• You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with those people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.

  Greg Mortenson

  Ignorance, Fighting, America

  Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin (2006). “Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time”, p.377, Penguin

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• Even if I’d been wide awake, I knew Dimitri would’ve taken my suitcase anyway. That’s how he was, a lost remnant of chivalry in the modern world, ever-ready to help others.

  Richelle Mead

  Taken, Helping Others, World

  Richelle Mead (2012). “The Golden Lily: A Bloodlines Novel”, p.24, Penguin

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• Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Love, Sexy, Warfare

  Malcolm Bradbury (1976). “The history man: a novel”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Faith, Inspiration, Silence

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• To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

  Mary McCarthy

  Children, Past, Reality

  Mary McCarthy (2011). “Memories Of A Catholic Girlhood”, p.16, Random House

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• Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Hands, Civilization

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• Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Real, Ideas, Having Fun

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.81, Verso

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• In this modern world plagued with counterfeits for the Lord's plan, we must not be misled into supposing that we can discharge our obligations to the poor and the needy by shifting the responsibility to some governmental or other public agency. Only by voluntarily giving out of an abundant love for our neighbors can we develop that charity characterized by Mormon as "the pure love of Christ." (Moro.7:47) This we must develop if we would obtain eternal life.

  Marion G. Romney

  Responsibility, Supposing That, Agency

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• I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. ... I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Islamic, Believe, Men

  Interview (April 1935), as quoted in "The Genuine Islam", Vol. 1, January 1936.

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• A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

  Clive James

  Wisdom, Good Life, America

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• The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Business, Mistake, Political

  "The Illustrated London News" Magazine, 1924.

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