Being Modern Quotes

#1. Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Salvador Dali

#2. Are modern children going to revolt against being modern, and if so, what form will reaction of modern parents take?

E.M. Delafield

#3. All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

Roland Barthes

#4. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.

Nathan Huggins

#5. One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Wallace Stevens

#6. What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#7. Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.

Gianni Vattimo

#8. Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.

Vance Havner

#9. One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

Muriel Rukeyser

#10. Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern.

Os Guinness

#11. A modern, autonomous, and thoroughly trained Air Force in being at all times will not alone be sufficient, but without it there can be no national security.

Henry H. Arnold

#12. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.

J.P. Donleavy

#13. Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That's why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.

Abhijit Naskar

#14. I was being flirted with for 'Modern Family,' which my wife still hasn't let me live down, but it's one of those things where that show is so brilliant because the casting couldn't be any more perfect. It wouldn't have been right for me, and I wouldn't have been right for it.

Josh Gad

#15. When I was at Manchester, where there was a modern swimming pool, I was looked on as a great man, not for so trivial a reason as being an FRS, but because I used to dive off a five-metre board.

Louis J. Mordell

#16. Dave's playing and repertoire evokes memories of the golden era of Modern Jazz, and in addition to being a nice guy he happens to be a bebopper of the finest order.

Chris Cortez

#17. The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.

Jamie Lee Curtis

#18. Can you, in a million years, imagine another female senator - Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Claire McCaskill - reacting to being called 'ma'am' like Barbara Boxer did? This is the kind of sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left that makes my teeth itch.

Mark Davis

#19. Marriages had different meanings back then than they do now, they were used to cement agreements between families, business deals and things like that. The idea of marriages being arranged for love is some sort of modern idea, really.

Jared Harris

#20. Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

John W. Gardner

#21. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

Michael Chabon

#22. Christianity was beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness ... modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them ...

G.K. Chesterton

#23. Niaqornat particularly seemed to offer a heightened version of a story being played out across the world about traditional communities' struggle for survival and their attempts to renegotiate their identity in the face of modern life.

Sarah Gavron

#24. When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.

Michael Harris

#25. Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification.

Emma Goldman

#26. For the longest time, Indian women have been okay with being curvy. But I think the modern Indian woman needs to get toned. I don't endorse being thin. Anorexia and bulimia are a reality in India because everybody wants to be thin.

Bipasha Basu

#27. Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Fatema Mernissi

#28. Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

G.K. Chesterton

#29. What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

Bill Bryson

#30. There was nothing dishonourable 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

#31. If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.

Geoffrey S. Fletcher

#32. Responsibility for the creation of the good world in which the good life may be realized, which the frustrated ages of the past loaded upon the gods, is now being assumed by man. The ideal of this modern drift is the realization of the full joy in living.

Eustace Haydon

#33. That was the peak. I just knew it was modern, not traditional culture. I could be cool

Li Peng

#34. When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity - called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called "inner" or "true" happiness.

Daniel J. Siegel

#35. ...To see your life flow in obscurity among the treasures of the heart and of nature, happy in your anonymity, and to occasionally lose yourself in reading or in the pleasure of being a sensitive admirer of the fine arts; that's the image of modern life you're looking for!

Paul Amadeus Dienach

#36. I do disapprove of the modern attitude that you can't do the simplest thing, like dying or being born, in your own house.

Ann Bridge

#37. The ethical life ... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society ... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

Roger Scruton

#38. I believe that one of the reasons for crime, perversion, and the evils of modern mankind is that we have lost belief in the certainty of God being just, holy, and righteous, and that He will judge the world.

Billy Graham

#39. Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before. Who'd have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

Ali Smith

#40. The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Winston S. Churchill

#41. Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event.

R.C. Sproul

#42. The Untouchables, in modern times, had won the useless right of being touched by the high caste, but they remained the poorest in the city. Every

Manu Joseph

#43. I can't imagine Hunger Games, even with its very popular books, being nearly a success that it's been without Jen Lawrence being the perfect person to play that role - a very modern celebrity, a very down-to-earth, accessible, celebrity.

Nina Jacobson

#44. Like modern science, Buddhism holds the basic premise that, at the most fundamental level, there is no qualitative difference between the material basis of the body of a sentient being, such as a human, and that of, say, a piece of rock.

Dalai Lama XIV

#45. Looking towards the future, one of the most important issues the national community must face is the widening gap between the liberated, modern, independent women and our traditional men who are being left behind.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar

#46. The problem with being an author in this modern world is such: computers break often; books don't

Emma Iadanza

#47. I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

Michael Tippett

#48. When you have somebody that's smart and you're not so smart, to me that's modern day slavery because you're being dictated to.

Bernard Hopkins

#49. The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#50. It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.

H.G.Wells

#51. When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#52. Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

Graham Harvey

#53. I always choose to look, as much as one can, at the supernatural not being something that exists outside of nature, but a deeper, fundamental heart of nature that perhaps humans ... have lost touch with. It's a more primal thing than perhaps we are attuned to in our modern, self-aware way of life.

Alan Ball

#54. Modern marriage has lost its meaning
consequently it is being abolished.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#55. Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

Jeanette Winterson

#56. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.

Rene Girard

#57. 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

#58. I don't cook - I can cook - but I'm not very good. I like being asked over for dinner, because she can't cook either. We would starve if it weren't for modern technology. I know how to work a microwave, but love home cooked meals.

Mark Mothersbaugh

#59. To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.

Luis Gonzalez

#60. The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

Marshall McLuhan

#61. The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.

Karen Armstrong

#62. Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

Emma Goldman

#63. Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'

Dan Jenkins

#64. Simple femininity is the most important thing about a woman, and it is a quality a great many women are in jeopardy of losing. Women are being emancipated out of their femininity in this modern age.

Yul Brynner

#65. The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

Gustave Le Bon

#66. Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

G.K. Chesterton

#67. Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern man, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being "hollow" and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.

Rollo May

#68. There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.

John DiIulio

#69. Modern theory is about objects lower than man; even stars, being common things, are lower than man.

Hans Jonas

#70. Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#71. I don't think about music as being new or modern. I just play.

Coleman Hawkins

#72. And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. The Prince, XVIII, 5

Niccolo Machiavelli

#73. Much of modern life is based upon a false logic, a logic that assumes that happiness and well-being come from financial prosperity.

Nic Marks

#74. Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

Brit Marling

#75. Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Robert Bly

#76. In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.

Alexander Lowen

#77. These are modern times, nicht? Not our grandmother's days. There's more to life than finding some lord and master and being under his thumb. I swear I'll never live in such a prison!

Phyllis Edgerly Ring

#78. When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.

Evgeny Morozov

#79. Being home secretary involves having to face some of the worst of human behaviour and challenges of modern society.

David Blunkett

#80. I'm very classic and structural. I love clean lines and interesting, modern details. But I'm all about being streamlined - less is more.

Nina Garcia

#81. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, 'coordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction,

George Orwell

#82. The modern designers are quite showy, and a lot of the young people really like it. Costume jewelry has always been about being noticed and not discreet.

Judith Miller

#83. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminution of work.

Bertrand Russell

#84. Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

John Ruskin

#85. For millennia, 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 existence as a living being in question

Michel Foucault

#86. My parents are very modern. My father is a cosmopolitan person. He always supported the fact that I will be an actress. There is nothing else I would do rather than being an actor.

Kareena Kapoor Khan

#87. You are remarkably modern, Mabel. A little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

Oscar Wilde

#88. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Martin Amis

#89. Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core - not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life ...

Hillary Clinton

#90. There's another advantage to being poor - a doctor will cure you faster.

Kin Hubbard

#91. Mathematics as we know it and as it has come to shape modern science could never have come into being without some disregard for the dangers of the infinite.

David Bressoud

#92. The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.

Glen Hansard

#93. 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

#94. Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

Salvador Dali

#95. The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.

Andrew Weil

#96. More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read.

Oscar Wilde

#97. The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.

Edith Hamilton

#98. The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

Edmund White

#99. Modern Slavery is not being shipped on boats; it is encouraging welfare programs and withholding information from the people that will aid them in making informed decisions.

Josephine Akhagbeme

#100. Islam is simple, but being a Muslim in a modern world is not. Everyday is a battle that each of us have to face. It is easy to get swept away and lose one's identity. The constant struggle is to find out who we are and how to remain steadfast.

Norhafsah Hamid