Modern Quotes - Page 17

• Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

  John le Carre

  Men, Wind, Generations

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• The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Rights, Names

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• [There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Men, Vices, Groups

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• In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Book, Order, Land

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• Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Dog, Cat, America

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• Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Memories, Passion

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.731, GENERAL PRESS

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• In the desert you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life. You discover your kinship with nature and man, which is evoked by the naturalness and the gentle humanity of the natives of the desert, and you will also discover God.

  Ameen Rihani

  Men, Humanity, Over You

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• A man of distinguished, beautiful eloquence, and persistent, over pressing thought... Ameen Rihani was one of the foremost pioneers of modern illumination. He firmly believed in the significance of reviving the Arab spirit and protecting the freedom of thought and the freedom of human conscience.

  Mikhail Naimy

  Beautiful, Men, Illumination

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• I'll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Balance, Needs, Guidance

  Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.12, Basic Books

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• Religion and science, for example, are often though to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, physics, but many were good psychologists.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Understanding, Example, May

  Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.241, Basic Books

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• For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.

  Michel Foucault

  Animal, Men, Political

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• Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

  Michel Foucault

  Hypocrisy, Facts, Spite

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.47, Vintage

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• In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

  W. H. Auden

  Two, Greek, Would Be

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• What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, Long, Waiting

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• A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Culture, May, Neurosis

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Usama bin Laden feels like Iraq is a part of this War on Terror. He has made it clear that he would like for us to leave before Iraq can defend itself or govern itself and sustain itself, so that he could have a safe haven from which to launch further attacks, a safe haven from which to topple modern governments, a safe haven from which to, you know, be able to get a hold of oil resources.

  George W. Bush

  War, Safe Haven, Oil

  "President Bush Discusses Midterms; War on Terror Strategy With Sean Hannity". "Hannity & Colmes", www.foxnews.com. October 30, 2006.

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• The rules of parenting have changed. By the modern definition, we were a generation of neglected children.

  Richard Linklater

  Children, Generations, Definitions

  "How Richard Linklater Turned a 'Crazy, Wildly Impractical Idea' Into an Oscar Front-Runner". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. June 27, 2014.

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• I don't think people ever were free of fear of death, but clinging to life and being so unprepared for it is a modern experience.

  Katy Butler

  Thinking, People, Fear Of Death

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.

  Sophie Barthes

  Mean, Reality, Good Enough

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted

  Lin Yutang

  Dream, War, Men

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• Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

  Albert Einstein

  Home, Men, White

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.37, Open Road Media

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• Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

  Noam Chomsky

  Powerful, Home, Mean

  "Drain the swamp and there will be no more mosquitoes" by Noam Chomsky, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2002.

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• The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism.

  Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

  Strong, War, Korea

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• The limited liability corporation is the greatest single invention of modern times.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Corporations, Invention, Liability

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• ...many of the officials, courtiers, and priests, representing the upper class of Egyptian society but not the royalty, looked strikingly like modern Europeans, especially long-headed ones

  Carleton S. Coon

  Class, Long, Royalty

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