Modern Thinking Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I think one manifestation of integrity is holding a grudge. Saying no is a little different. Holding a grudge is the modern equivalent of having standards.

Fran Lebowitz

#3. I do not think that the nerve of the modern child is any too good; how can one expect it, brought up as they are amongst all the horrors of civilization. The 'daring' child who used to be common enough, is seldom met nowadays.

Muriel Wace

#4. 85% of modern music doesn't have a damn thing to do with music. It has to do with looking good. Name me one woman on the top ten right now who isn't absolutely smoking hot. You think that's a coincidence?

Patrick Rothfuss

#5. 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

#6. The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential character than of its dangers, and that is why I think of it as being an expression of transcendence.

Talal Asad

#7. What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

John Shelby Spong

#8. I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

Zephyr Teachout

#9. I think all experience is, in some way, shape or form, filtered down to help you, in your present moment. With Shakespeare, you're trying to act with a fairly archaic language, although in certain aspects, it's deeply modern.

Joseph Fiennes

#10. The unknown is the most frightening and mysterious thing, especially in the modern world where we can practically Google anything and find out the back story. I think to have that element of mystery [in your movie], it almost creates a frustration that is closer to real life.

Larry Fessenden

#11. Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won't be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn't be either.

Betty Friedan

#12. I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.

Simon Singh

#13. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part

George Orwell

#14. Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

Richard Wilbur

#15. People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.

Susan Jacoby

#16. I was struggling to find a way to make evening clothes more deconstructed. I like to think that I translated the Latin concept in a more modern way. I don't think that I was that literal.

Vera Wang

#17. I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.

John Carney

#18. I think our seniors deserve a modern medical system.

George W. Bush

#19. My motto is, 'What's the hurry?' I'm trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.

Joe Strummer

#20. Modern formulaic society will try to make you "normal," rushing to call pseudoscientific anything you can do that they can't.

Sahara Sanders

#21. The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.

Theodor Haecker

#22. I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.

Robertson Davies

#23. Hillary Clinton does very well in Pennsylvania generally. I think she connects with the working white people and all kinds of people that normally would have a problem with the modern Democratic Party.

Chris Matthews

#24. I think what's happened in the modern world, there's a lot of people that sound very smart and it's very compelling and alluring, but it leaves you empty.

Rob Bell

#25. It's modern day. It is modern day. Some of the cars are older but it is absolutely modern day. There are modern cars in it, modern people, modern clothes, modern talk. We wrote 'Valentine' to sort of pay tribute to all the old slasher movies that we grew up with and I think that we did that.

Todd Farmer

#26. Modern economic thinking ... is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.

E.F. Schumacher

#27. The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

George Bernard Shaw

#28. With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Joel Miller

#29. Modern responses to Cinderella's predicament are interesting. If you're not careful, you'll think, "Well, she's just a big wimp. She should fight for her rights. She should call the government."

Chris Weitz

#30. Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Tom Stoppard

#31. Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

Carl Sagan

#32. What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few ... A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#33. I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention.

Richard Davidson

#34. I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability that we're seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States.

Bernie Sanders

#35. If you think of modern art like sex in all its forms - heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, multipartnered, bestial, whatever, with absolutely no holds barred and with everything available and permissible - that would be modern art.

Eve Arnold

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

Coleman Hawkins

#37. I don't think the Republican Party, or I should say the Republican Party as the vehicle for modern American conservative ideas, survives with Donald Trump.

Bret Stephens

#38. Modern minds no longer object to the Church because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no longer have difficulties with the Creed, but with her Commandments. The heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, but of action.

Fulton J. Sheen

#39. If we've deluded ourselves into thinking that our angry mass emails or conversation-stopping talking points serve as a ministry or carry out the purposes of God, we need to slow down and take a breath.

David Dark

#40. I am very traditional as a man. I am not modern and never have been. I think I was born 50 years of age and out of my time.

David Suchet

#41. Recent generations seem to consider 'old-fashioned' thinking as out-dated and without place in the modern world. I beg to differ. After all, who has greater faith? He who looks to and learns from the past, or the man who cares not for consequence?

Fennel Hudson

#42. I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.

Nick Cave

#43. Both Zen and mysticsm have this beautiful quality of happiness and laughter, which I think is so necessary in our modern age.

Frederick Lenz

#44. Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.

Philip Pullman

#45. Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau

#46. And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.

Willem De Kooning

#47. I don't think we should try to make space our own. I believe that as modern people we should live in mobility. We should always be moving.

Yohji Yamamoto

#48. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

Kurt Vonnegut

#49. The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.

C.S. Lewis

#50. Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world
the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?

Honore De Balzac

#51. Be young. Keep yourself young by having a good, sporty car like a Corvette. It keeps you on your toes. It keeps you young. It keeps you thinking young. It keeps you thinking modern and good things. Corvette is a modern, modern automobile.

Jack LaLanne

#52. This tough-love, winner-take-all narrative dominating policymaking is far too limited a way to think about how a complex, modern, diverse economy like ours expands and thrives. The strongest periods of economic growth in the 20th century were also times when incomes rose across the board.

John Podesta

#53. I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#54. I really think, without trying to give us credit that we don't deserve, I really feel like Kurt and Blaine are a modern version of Lucy and Ricky. Oh, I'm Lucy for sure.

Chris Colfer

#55. Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.

Frank Zappa

#56. An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary.

Joseph McCarthy

#57. I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.

Quinlan Terry

#58. I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company.

Bertrand Russell

#59. There has been an effect of business rap on the output of today's rap music. But I don't think that's the modern day rapper's fault.

M.I.A.

#60. These are the beautiful people, who, befitting their rank as gods and goddesses of a powerful modern mythology, lead beautiful lives in beautiful houses, attired in beautiful clothes and, ostensibly, thinking only beautiful thoughts.

Helen Lawrenson

#61. If you ask which of the scenarios I think is most dangerous, though, I will give a different answer. In that form of the question, I regard a nuclear attack, terrorist-generated or otherwise, as the most threatening combination of likelihood and long-term damage to modern life today.

John L. Casti

#62. If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem - the loneliness of the thinking Christian.

Harry Blamires

#63. The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Garry Kasparov

#64. That's one of the good things about a lot of the young British bands, they are mixing all styles of music. I think that's very good because that's very modern.

Mick Jagger

#65. I think the big thing is the fairy tale. It's taking old folk fairy tales and retelling them in modern day. I think it's just taking you out of everyday life, and everyone loves a good fairy tale.

Lily Collins

#66. Modern women like to think we invented the idea of balancing work and family but women have always done it.

Clare Wright

#67. With couture, you feel obligated to design something modern each season, but with Theyskens Theory, I don't question anything. I'm thinking of what I'd like to wear.

Olivier Theyskens

#68. 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

#69. Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Harper Lee

#70. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Julia Stiles

#71. I think one of the serious breakdowns in modern evangelism is this: it has offered too much for too little. What we do mostly is offer forgiveness. We need cleansing! There is no true conversion until a man takes up his cross.

Leonard Ravenhill

#72. I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!

P.G. Wodehouse

#73. Polytheism is too delicate a way of thinking for modern minds.

John N. Gray

#74. I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money.

Roger Corman

#75. The Night Manager doesn't exist in the post-Cold war universe, it exists much more in the modern world, I think. There is more action. The bad guys don't have particularly political or national-political affiliations.

Tom Hiddleston

#76. I think therapeutic spirituality has largely been a help in the modern world. So the fact that people can approach religion with practical needs.

Mitch Horowitz

#77. I can think of no one more qualified to write about the modern South than Curtis Wilkie

Willie Morris

#78. Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin . We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.

Eric Hoffer

#79. No one must think that Newton's great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this [Theory of Relativity] or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.

Albert Einstein

#80. I think that's very important for romantic comedies, that they do deal with [modern]issues.

Jennifer Lopez

#81. Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Barbara Kingsolver

#82. All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we've had in modern times.

Mitch McConnell

#83. You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

Danny Boyle

#84. You've got to respond to that and of course thinking through the role of a left party in the modern world, in the modern economy and society and having a policy response to that.

Patricia Hewitt

#85. I'd like to do a little bit of everything. I think the only thing I can't do is a British accent, so that's out. No Shakespeare for me. Unless it's like one of those modern-day remakes.

Jenny Slate

#86. The modern woman is the curse of the universe. A disaster, that's what. She thinks that before her arrival on the scene no woman ever did anything worthwhile before, no woman was ever liberated until her time, no woman really ever amounted to anything.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

#87. I think in a lot of modern action movies, it's hard to see what's going on. Shaky cam ...

Tommy Wirkola

#88. My mom was always a big fan of Elvis. She made me listen to Elvis when I was a kid. I hated it. And I think now I've kind of grown up to fill in some of the sort of controversy that he created back in his day, but in a much more extreme, modern sense.

Marilyn Manson

#89. While I still did not know what self- actualization that sat on the top level of the pyramid meant, I could believe
that if I knew I would be able to say something positive about it as well in
my life.

Vann Chow

#90. 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

#91. I don't think environmentalists have the slightest reason to be concerned about globalization because every time you move a plant to a new place you upgrade the neighborhood. You put in global standards. You put in modern plants. And all the plants around it get improved.

Jack Welch

#92. I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole.

Frank Zappa

#93. I don't think there's anything remotely "new" or "experimental" about any modern metal bands.

Mat McNerney

#94. I'm alarmed that to think than modern science may be turning creativity into a medical disorder

Thomas Armstrong

#95. Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

Robert Anton Wilson

#96. As modern tyrannies are swept away (and every honest heart delights), the quick-thinking servants of the world's great powers still proffer plans to intervene, to jostle, scheme and sponsor factions that they barely understand.

Catherine Merridale

#97. I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.

Taika Waititi

#98. I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.

Anne Roiphe

#99. I think when the joke comes from the situation in a horror film, it's really great. I don't like jokey horror films like where people are cracking a joke or being post-modern about it.

Guillermo Del Toro

#100. One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.

William E. Rees