Our Time Quotes - Page 6

• Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create their own dangers.

  Gail Godwin

  Youth, Danger, Young

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• It's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.

  Margaret Atwood

  Children, Growth, Doe

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• One of the great disappointments of our time has been that the United States, a beacon of hope during the freedom struggles of the Asian peoples, succumbed to the views and greater colonial experience of nations grown to power in an earlier period.

  Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

  Disappointment, Struggle, Views

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• I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.

  Jean Kerr

  Mirrors, Done, Chaos

  JEAN KERR (1970). “Penny Candy”

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• One of the greatest disasters of our time is our universal acceptance of the word "tolerance" as a great virtue.

  Zig Ziglar

  Acceptance, Tolerance, Virtue

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• The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Uplifting, Art, Bored

  Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982). “The collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer”, Vintage

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• If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.

  Thomas Sowell

  Regret, Yesterday, Worry

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• The happy problem of our time - longer life.

  Lillian Hellman

  Age, Problem, Longer Life

  Lillian Hellman (1971). “The collected plays”, Little Brown and Company

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• Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Reading, Fake, Literature

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.42, Ultramarine Publishing

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• We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.

  Meryl Streep

  Knowing, Groups, Who We Are

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• After decades of declining influence on the affairs of the world, there is once again a widespread consideration of spritual principles as an antidote to the pain of our times.

  Marianne Williamson

  Pain, Principles, World

  Marianne Williamson (2013). “Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage”, p.17, Random House

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• In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman.

  Horace Mann

  Country, Men, Names

  Horace Mann (1845). “Lectures on Education”, p.162

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• I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Real, Believe

  "Photography at the Crossroads". Essay by Berenice Abbott, 1951.

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• No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Mirrors, Matter, Individual

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• Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death. Waiting is a special kind of activity - if activity is the right word for it - because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  People, Waiting, Special

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

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• Celebrity is the religion of our time.

  Maureen Dowd

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• We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

  Pauline Kael

  Country, Art, Hero

  Pauline Kael (1994). “For keeps”, E P Dutton

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• In our times, significantly, the three outstanding voices against violence have been silenced by murder - Mahatma Gandhi in India, Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and Dr. Martin Luther King, here at home.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Kings, Home, Voice

  Millicent Fenwick (1982). “Speaking up”, Harpercollins

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• The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Communism, Communist, Myth

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.292, Random House

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• Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.

  Ellen Key

  Dream, Personality, Remnants

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• Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.

  Renata Adler

  Profound, Moral, Sanity

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.8, New York Review of Books

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• We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.

  Han Suyin

  Vulnerable, Products

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• Our times are obsessed with finding fulfillment, so there are times when some people try too hard, and there are people who want to have the newest feelings just as there are those who want to have the latest model car. You can't play at love any more than you can be proud of your humility, or add water to your perfume and have it smell the same, but men and women both have been known to try.

  Merle Shain

  Humility, Men, Play

  Merle Shain (1973). “Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others”

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• Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Hymns, America

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• There is no wrong suffering. There is imaginary, sham, feigned, simulated, pretended suffering. But the assertion that someone suffers for the right or wrong reason presupposes a divine, all-penetrating judgment able to distinguish historically obsolete forms of suffering from those in our time, instead of leaving this decision to the sufferers themselves.

  Dorothee Solle

  Decision, Leaving, Suffering

  Dorothee Sölle (1975). “Suffering”, Fortress Press

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