Modern Quotes - Page 4

• The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kindness, Character, Doe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Reform, Doe

  "The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1990.

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• The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Different, Culture, Heritage

  "Holding on to Romanticism". "The Illustrated London News" Magazine, May 2, 1931.

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• An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Powerful, Stupid, Race

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.191, Simon and Schuster

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• I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  America, Democracy, Ancient

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• The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Race, Discovery, Incredibles

  H. P. Blavatsky (1994). “Isis Unveiled: (Two Volumes in a Slipcase)”, Quest Books

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• "True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Latin, Hands, Two

  "Isis Unveiled". Book by Helena Blavatsky. Volume I, Chapter VII, 1877.

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• I hesitate to say what the functions of the modern journalist may be, but I imagine that they do not exclude the intelligent anticipation of the facts even before they occur.

  George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

  Intelligent, May, Facts

  1898 House of Commons, 29 Mar.

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• Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.

  Ernest Gellner

  Men, Play, Different

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• Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.

  Edward Burnett Tylor

  Humanity, Tribes, Culture

  Edward Burnett Tylor (2016). “Primitive Culture”, p.426, Courier Dover Publications

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• City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Venice, Should Have, Cities

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• I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

  William P. Young

  Religious, Book, Thinking

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• Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Intellectual

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.616, Vintage

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• The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

  Henry Adams

  Home, Greek, Style

  Henry Adams (2017). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.116, BookRix

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• Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Giving, Political, Prejudice

  Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington (1838). “The Confessions of an Elderly Lady”, p.5

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• I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a "panacea" for human ills; it is something much more rational - an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past.

  Henry Stephens Salt

  Past, Vegetarianism, Progress

  "The Humanities of Diet". Book by Henry Stephens Salt, 1897.

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• Now ... the basic principle of modern mathematics is to achieve a complete fusion [of] 'geometric' and 'analytic' ideas.

  Jean Dieudonne

  Ideas, Fusion, Principles

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• We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.

  William O. Douglas

  War, Power, Years

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• In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Latin, Book, Years

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• A 'well regulated militia' was thus one that was well-trained and equipped, not one that was 'well-regulated' in the modern sense of being subjected to numerous government prohibitions and restrictions.

  Glenn Reynolds

  Government, Prohibition, Restriction

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• The modern airplane creates a new geographic dimension ... the world is small, the world is one.

  Wendell Willkie

  Airplane, World, Dimensions

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• I am not of the opinion generally entertained in this country [England], that man lives by Greek and Latin alone; that is, by knowing a great many words of two dead languages, which nobody living knows perfectly, and which are of no use in the common intercourse of life. Useful knowledge, in my opinion, consists of modern languages, history, and geography; some Latin may be thrown into the bargain, in compliance with custom, and for closet amusement.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Education, Country, Latin

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• The classic literature is always modern.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Literature, Classic, Preference

  "Caxtoniana: Hints on Mental Culture". Book by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1862.

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• The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Fate, Tragedy, Weakness

  D. H. Lawrence, Bruce Steele (1985). “Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays”, p.30, Cambridge University Press

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• In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Jobs, Opportunity, Missing

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