Top 100 Quotes About Contemporary
#1. I look at graphic design as communication, meaning that the work has to have a vibe to connect to the viewer or perceiver. I make a black and white drawing and then add color digitally, bringing in a contemporary pattern to the composition to create a vibrance.
John Van Hamersveld
#2. The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.
William March
#3. I have always personally preferred to think of what is more difficult for my instrument, and not what is the most natural or the easiest. I enjoy the challenges - especially those that come with composers who have written contemporary music for the recorder.
Michala Petri
#4. I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.
Nigel Hamilton
#5. The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.
Nick Lowe
#6. I wrote a call to the contemporary Muslim conscience, saying to the ordinary people that we might not like the video or the cartoons, but that violence certainly isn't the right answer. I don't think laws are going to solve the problem.
Tariq Ramadan
#7. This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.
Ludwig Von Mises
#8. I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?
Harold Prince
#9. No, it's interesting to remake a film for the contemporary audience today. I think it's a good idea; it needs to respect the original idea. Don't just take the title and change everything else.
Dario Argento
#10. The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity.
Charlotte Bydler
#12. The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.
Don DeLillo
#13. My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age.
Ted Dekker
#14. Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?
Judith Butler
#15. Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
William Golding
#16. Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time.
DJ Spooky
#17. There are a couple of specific things about the show [Into the Badlands]. We didn't want to do a contemporary show, which is always "Chinese cop comes to New York, teams up with racist cop, together they fight crime ... "
Miles Millar
#18. A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is ourselves. '
Claude Bernard
#19. Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.
Jerry Yang
#20. I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is.
Ang Lee
#21. Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.
Tony Judt
#22. When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
Tom Perrotta
#23. People see their own lives as stories; a lifelong story with a single hero or heroine ... much contemporary unhappiness is due to the fact that people in high tech societies receive neither strong myths and stories from their culture nor the ability to construct their own ... they lose the plot.
Guy Claxton
#24. Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.
Eleanor Catton
#25. I grew up listening to Patsy Klein, Reba Mcentire and would study their voices. But once I became bored with that, I moved on to more contemporary stuff like Sheryl Crow and I combined everything that I had learned from country and rock and made this CD.
Hope Partlow
#26. Contemporary Democrats are people who can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere is experiencing good news.
Rich Lowry
#27. Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.
John Blacking
#28. Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.
Simon Blackburn
#29. Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.
Igor Babailov
#30. Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.
Dennis Prager
#31. Contemporary feminism is enamored with consumer choice and has fully accepted it as a substitute for freedom.
Holly Grigg-Spall
#32. The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act.
Carroll Quigley
#33. One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
Terry Teachout
#34. Contemporary culture is like the weather - we have to be open to it. I don't like the way it is dismissed or closed down.
Amanda Harlech
#35. To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.
David Whyte
#36. If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.
Elizabeth Peyton
#38. Euclid ... manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.
Lucio Russo
#39. I have no qualm about the quality of the contemporary repertory,
John Bonham
#40. Spanking is about pleasure, not pain, and contemporary couples of my acquaintance swap positions so that she has a turn at spanking and he submits to her loving hand. He does not have a clitoris, of course, but an erection heated by a good spanking is firmer and lasts long into the night.
Chloe Thurlow
#41. The new Babylonian captivity is what we have done to ourselves, namely, the strange fascination with our contemporary culture evident across denominational and confessional lines.
Harold L. Senkbeil
#42. I don't listen to the contemporary pop artists. They all sound alike, anyway.
Patti LuPone
#43. Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers ... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Angela Carter
#44. Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung.
John Allison
#45. Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.
E. M. Forster
#46. To be contemporary actually means to be an artist. [But] I do not feel contemporary in my work. I perceive my work as old-fashioned. It does not have a frame of actuality in our time or locality.
Odd Nerdrum
#47. Given that the 'common sense' of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between the manifest image and an out of date scientific image.11
James Ladyman
#48. I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
Neel Mukherjee
#49. My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all.
Tracey Emin
#50. I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.
Thurston Moore
#51. The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges
#52. I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis from which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species.
Jonathan Ott
#53. There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.
Dasha Zhukova
#54. I did a series called Ned and Stacey for two years for Fox back in the 90s. I was writer on it as well as a producer, and it was very important to me that there were no contemporary references.
Thomas Haden Church
#55. If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#56. 'Don't Look Back' is my first YA contemporary mystery/thriller. It's been described as 'Black Swan' meets 'Pretty Little Liars'.
Jennifer Armentrout
#57. It is very difficult to build contemporary architecture in Italy
Fabio Novembre
#58. The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.
Georg Simmel
#59. Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting.
Robert Genn
#60. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.
Agatha Christie
#61. Polytheism may be more consonant with contemporary life, its mixed populations, and its recognition of psychic complexity and interdependence, than a rigorous Protestant monotheism.
Page DuBois
#62. History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.
Ken Loach
#63. We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.
Theodore C. Bestor
#64. All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.
Vladimir Lenin
#65. I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.
Matthew Pearl
#66. It's weird because I think of movies like Reality Bites or something, where, even though my life was nothing like that, I hadn't done something contemporary for a while, and it's easier. You do try to make something your own.
Winona Ryder
#67. Fashion has always been nourished by the past. At the end of the day, where the inspiration comes from doesn't matter. It's what you do with it. How you treat it, how you translate it into a contemporary wardrobe. You put it in a shaker.
Christophe Lemaitre
#68. You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
Leopold Von Ranke
#70. Because contemporary paganism is essentially so new, its underlying ethical structure is not particularly sophisticated.
Liz Williams
#71. I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can't do it. They don't have the chops.
Jeffrey Wright
#72. As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
David Graeber
#73. Obviously I always wanted to do a contemporary piece.
Orlando Bloom
#74. By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's pre-existence.
Jeremy Collier
#75. The defining problem of contemporary television is trust: Can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society?
Jeremy Paxman
#76. All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real ...
Vijay Seshadri
#77. The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.
Kenny G
#78. Although contemporary advertising is relatively young, it already has a considerable tradition. Each new ad is encountered against a background of thousands of earlier ads.
Guy Cook
#79. This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
David Foster Wallace
#80. What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.
Molly Ivins
#81. Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
Camille Paglia
#82. Mother's taste was eclectic and ranged from the ancient world to the contemporary from Europe to the U.S.
David Rockefeller
#83. To appeal to contemporary man to revert, in this twentieth century, to a pagan-like nature worship in order to restrain technology from further encroachment and devastation of the resources of nature, is a piece of atavistic nonsense.
Norman Lamm
#84. Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon.
Jacques Maritain
#85. I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.
Jennifer Egan
#86. I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
#87. An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre.
L. Frank Baum
#88. I'm interested in contemporary vision - the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!
James Rosenquist
#89. Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#90. The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.
Paul Kurtz
#91. I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.
Moby
#92. It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
James Wolcott
#93. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#94. My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.
Ted Allen
#95. For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
Billy Collins
#96. The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.
Terry Teachout
#97. All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it.
Steve Reich
#98. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#99. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
#100. I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
Walter Kirn
