Top 100 Quotes About Modern Man
#1. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.
Edward R. Murrow
#2. A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.
Michel Faber
#3. For modern man, survival meant mental change. The stubborn died as martyrs; the fanatic and the philosopher perished in the face of sudden change. To survive now one had to be pliable; one had to adjust to new codes and ideals and morals. The mind had to change.
William Mulvihill
#4. Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. He remembered believing there had been a time when monsters roamed the earth. The brave hearted fought flesh-and-blood dragons instead of shadowboxing their inner demons, the sport of modern man.
Katherine Starbird
#7. I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.
Ridley Scott
#8. What can convince modern man is not a historical or a psychological or a continually ever modernizing Christianity but only the unrestricted and uninterrupted message of Revelation.
Romano Guardini
#10. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. From "Modern Man" in Every Lyric Tells A Story
His life is run by telephones and clocks
He changes his women, like he changes his socks
He plays to win and sometimes he plays rough
Knows a lot about sex but not much about love
Mark Wilkins
#12. Apart from his political opinions, I also took over my husband's opinion that he is a modern man, treating women like equals. Love makes you blind sometimes.
Lucie Novak
#13. Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.
Loren Eiseley
#14. Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
H.L. Mencken
#15. I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
Albert Camus
#16. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist
Fernand Leger
#17. There is a strong movement, especially in Protestantism, to recast the Christian message in order to make it acceptable to modern man.
Billy Graham
#18. We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature ... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.
Lewis Thomas
#19. In looking at waste as an entirely modern, man-made idea, I stopped viewing garbage as garbage and instead slowly started to see it as a commodity.
Tom Szaky
#20. Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.
Erich Fromm
#21. Neckties satisfy modern man's desire to dress in art.
Harry Anderson
#22. Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#23. A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living ... No sensible answer can be given to the question ... because the question does not make any sense.
Erich Fromm
#24. Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands - a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.
John Galsworthy
#25. The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#26. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
Tim Ferriss
#27. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
Bertrand Russell
#28. Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.
Fulton J. Sheen
#29. Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.
Lewis Mumford
#31. The modern man is necessarily a seeker of God, maybe a Man of Christ.
Joseph Goebbels
#32. Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.
Allen Carr
#33. Seek above all for a game worth playing- such is the advice of the oracle to modern man.
Robert S. De Ropp
#34. The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Vaclav Havel
#35. Modern man is sick because he is not whole.
Carl Jung
#36. Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.
Francis Schaeffer
#37. Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
Kenneth Rexroth
#38. All too often modern man becomes the plaything of his circumstances because he no longer has any leisure time; he doesn't know how to provide himself with the leisure he needs to stop to take a good look at himself.
Michel Quoist
#39. Modern man is too impatient and wants to master the art of meditation immediately.
Rama Swami
#40. 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
#41. Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#42. Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
George Will
#43. Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
Arthur Koestler
#44. For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.
Bertrand Russell
#45. Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he's too busy to enjoy.
Frank A. Clark
#46. We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.
Richard Leakey
#47. Modern man is a hard-working human ...
Ed Wood
#48. Modern man is probably a more humiliated and depressed creature than he dares to know.
Michael Leunig
#49. By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis Mumford
#50. Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side
E.F. Schumacher
#51. I have no problems with buying tampons. I am a fairly modern man. But apparently they're not a "proper" present. "Happy birthday, mum!"
Jimmy Carr
#52. Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.
Jess Winfield
#53. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
#54. Modern man is battered by the fundamental forces of his own psyche.
Carl Jung
#55. Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency.
Colin Wilson
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Unfortunately, modern man has become so focused on harnessing nature's resources that he has forgotten how to learn from them. If you let them, however, the elements of nature will teach you as they have taught me.
Anasazi Foundation
#59. The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" ('God in Search of Man' p34)
Paul F Herring
#60. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#61. The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#62. The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#63. Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.
Lin Yutang
#64. The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.
Richard Flanagan
#65. Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.
G. Stanley Hall
#66. The challenge of work-life balance is without question one of the most significant struggles faced by modern man.
Stephen Covey
#67. Our tendency today is to assume that we can eliminate the authority of husband over wife and yet retain the authority of husband-wife over the children. The Bible is more realistic about marriage than modern man, for the truth is that in disobeying the one hierarchy we destroy the other.
Charles F. Stanley
#68. The tragic element in modern man, not ignore the meaning of his life, but it bothers him less and less.
Vaclav Havel
#69. Francis Wheen takes a hugely enjoyable sweep through the tangled thickets of superstition and gullibility in which modern man likes to ramble. He takes particular delight in reminding us how easily fools are parted from their money and how many of them there are.
Ferdinand Mount
#70. Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.
Pope Francis
#71. I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.
Alexander Herzen
#72. The sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.
El Lissitzky
#73. A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#74. That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand its original significance.
Muhammad Iqbal
#75. Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#76. Modern man lives more and more in a preponderantly geometric order. All human creation mechanical or industrial is dependent upon geometric intentions.
Fernand Leger
#77. Today's coastal development along with hurricane amnesia places modern man on a collision course with catastrophe if the lessons of history are ignored.
Max Mayfield
#78. Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.
Earl Wilson
#79. Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#80. The modern man has become a machine for survival, which is largely the result of work of chemicals and genetic codes.
Lynne McTaggart
#81. Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.
Alberto Moravia
#82. Cheeseburgers. I'm fairly certain they're the most wonderful food invented by modern man.
Stacey Jay
#83. If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
Vaclav Havel
#84. Modern man worships at the temple of science, but science tells him only what is possible, not what is right.
Milton S. Eisenhower
#85. The "modern man" has "come of age" as a deadly serious adult, conscious of his sufferings and alienations but not of joy, of sex but not of love, of science but not of "mystery.
Alexander Schmemann
#86. Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and distraction.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#87. The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.
Anthony Daniels
#88. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.
Erich Fromm
#89. I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect.
Mike Nelson
#90. Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.
Anthony Daniels
#91. The positive sum of pleasures in a modern man's life is undoubtedly greater than was to be found in more primitive communities, but the consciousness of what might be has increased even more.
Bertrand Russell
#92. A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.
Elias Canetti
#93. 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
#94. Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
Erich Fromm
#95. The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
Richard M. Weaver
#96. Economists talk about profit motive, but nothing motivates modern man more than a chance to avoid taxes!
Peter Drucker
#97. Modern man's difficulties, dangerous beliefs and feelings of loneliness, spiritual emptiness,and personal weakness are caused by his illusions about, and separation from, the natural world.
Benjamin Hoff
#98. It is because of his brain that [modern man] has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above.
Will Cuppy
#99. This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac
Cristiane Serruya
#100. Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.
Erich Fromm
