Top 100 Quotes About Contemporary
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. I have no qualm about the quality of the contemporary repertory,
John Bonham
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I don't listen to the contemporary pop artists. They all sound alike, anyway.
Patti LuPone
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.
Thurston Moore
#19. The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 'Don't Look Back' is my first YA contemporary mystery/thriller. It's been described as 'Black Swan' meets 'Pretty Little Liars'.
Jennifer Armentrout
#25. It is very difficult to build contemporary architecture in Italy
Fabio Novembre
#26. 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
#27. Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting.
Robert Genn
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. Because contemporary paganism is essentially so new, its underlying ethical structure is not particularly sophisticated.
Liz Williams
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Obviously I always wanted to do a contemporary piece.
Orlando Bloom
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.
Kenny G
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
Camille Paglia
#50. Mother's taste was eclectic and ranged from the ancient world to the contemporary from Europe to the U.S.
David Rockefeller
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.
Jennifer Egan
#54. I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
#55. 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
#56. I'm interested in contemporary vision - the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!
James Rosenquist
#57. 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
#58. The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.
Paul Kurtz
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#68. The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .
John Maynard Keynes
#69. As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life.
Japan Foundation
#70. Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.
Adolf Hitler
#71. I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.
Alexander Payne
#72. The findings in contemporary social sciences are helping us understand that we can find other ways to educate people and act against injustice and corruption in our society.
Tariq Ramadan
#73. When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.
James Laver
#74. Amnesia and complete indifference to history (especially the history of technological amnesia) remain the defining features of contemporary Internet debate.
Evgeny Morozov
#75. In Portugal, my sculpture 'She Changes' refers to the town's fishing history, to the era of seafaring trade and discovery. The contemporary site is industrial, surrounded by red and white striped smokestacks, which is mirrored in the pattern of the sculpture.
Janet Echelman
#76. Most contemporary philosophers are conservative and eager to keep their jobs.
Mario Bunge
#77. I don't like all of the contemporary country. I like some of it, but I'm mostly into the traditional style.
Kim Dickens
#78. The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.
Luigi Ghirri
#79. The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners.
D. Elton Trueblood
#80. Our goal at Home Theater Films is to inspire and entertain our audience. We want to make great movies that everyone can enjoy and elevate them with contemporary, relatable characters that naturally demonstrate their faith in real world situations.
Corbin Bernsen
#81. One of those blocks (that prevent the 'Middle East from entering the mainstream of modernity') is the orthodox tenet that the Koran and the scriptures contain all the knowledge required to deal with the problems of contemporary society.
Arnold Beichman
#82. Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith's Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre
Nancy Pearl
#83. I went to the University/Resident Theatre Association auditions. Deans come and watch you in this theater. You have three minutes, and you have to do two contrasting monologues - at that time, this is 2003 - one classical and one contemporary.
Kunal Nayyar
#84. I love fashion. What I love is the ability to express yourself, to be able to make a product and shoot an ad campaign that tosses you out into the world and lets you have a voice in contemporary culture, iconography. I felt a little bit neutered not having that voice.
Tom Ford
#85. I've never been at odds with the world of contemporary artists. If there is any animosity, it's one-sided.
Thomas Kinkade
#86. Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.
Camille Paglia
#87. The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
Berenice Abbott
#88. My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.
Anthony Braxton
#89. Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist.
Adam Gopnik
#90. This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society,
Ai Weiwei
#91. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.
Anthony Everitt
#92. There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.
Hamish Bowles
#93. All the pictures I do are contemporary. I've sort of discovered I haven't really been into science fiction or period pictures. And so, in that vein, psychological thrillers play a big part.
Michael Douglas
#94. Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.
William Boyd
#95. The United States of America is one of the most studied but least understood nations in the contemporary world.
Robert Singh
#96. The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary sunlight of our star.
Wes Jackson
#97. They're great instrumentalists, singers and songwriters and they have this unique way of blending contemporary with traditional. The result is this beautiful mix of timeless music.
Cindy Cashdollar
#98. 'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.
Camille Paglia
#99. I always thought 'chick lit' meant third-person contemporary funny novels, dealing with issues of the day. I mean, it's not the ideal term; when I'm asked to describe what I do, I say I write romantic comedies, cause that's what I feel they are. But I'm quite pragmatic.
Sophie Kinsella
#100. Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.
Liz Williams
