Modern Thinkers Quotes

#1. What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'

Michael Ignatieff

#2. It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

Lafcadio Hearn

#3. Foolish defiance was his lifelong response to being ill.

Paul C. Nagel

#4. To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks.

Mason Cooley

#5. Science is the most effective, efficient and magnificent path that leads towards the salvation of humankind.

Abhijit Naskar

#6. Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.

Charles Simic

#7. Sophistication is not science people, simplicity is.

Abhijit Naskar

#8. Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.

James Purefoy

#9. Being accepted by the world is the worst thing that can happen to the Church.

Michael L. Brown

#10. There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In

Steven Weinberg

#11. If you're going to be part of a nationally televised show that airs live and do sketches that haven't even been brainstormed a week earlier, you really can't be afraid to fail.

Casey Wilson

#12. The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Sylvia Plath

#13. I've made a number of independent films that didn't receive theatrical distribution, that a lot of people haven't heard of, and as a result, I've conditioned myself to go into small independent films with the expectation that they will not, and therefore, I have to find my reward elsewhere.

William Mapother

#14. Since no man has a predetermined destiny, every day all man can create a new destiny for himself!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#15. But even I have enough sense to know the words "we have to win" are the first four steps on the road to hell.

Katherine Applegate

#16. Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.

Adolf Hitler

#17. Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.

Matthew Stewart

#18. Where focus goes, energy flows.

Tony Robbins