Top 55 Quotes About Moderns
#1. To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.
Benjamin Franklin
#2. What we moderns call "addictions" God calls "idols," and all of God's good gifts are meant to raise our eyes in thanksgiving to our benevolent heavenly Father, not to fix our eyes on the gifts themselves.
Michael S. Horton
#3. Grace has not been well understood by the post-modern church let alone applied as post-moderns in our lives as a reality that Christ secured for us."
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#4. If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them
structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#5. The truth is that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is permanent. It began with Zinjanthropus (one million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago) and will end only with humanity-- or perhaps the mutants who succeed us will take up the cause.
Francois Le Lionnais
#6. Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.
Fulton J. Sheen
#7. The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#8. The Greek word pseudepigrapha is a Greek word meaning 'falsely superscribed,' or what we moderns might call writing under a pen name. The classification, 'OT Pseudepigrapha,' is a label that scholars have given to these writings.
Craig A. Evans
#9. Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
Robert Frost
#10. The volumes of antiquity, like medals, may very well serve to amuse the curious, but the works of the moderns, like the current coin of a kingdom, are much better for immediate use.
Oliver Goldsmith
#12. The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns.
Madame De Stael
#13. The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.
Heinrich Heine
#14. Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.
William Penn
#15. The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.
Benjamin Franklin
#16. We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Michael Pollan
#17. The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#18. Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.
Jeremy Collier
#19. The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.
Jean De La Bruyere
#20. It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.
Albert Einstein
#21. In an age in which greed and lust stalk the land like some Biblical plague, it is easy to view sex as just one more thing to be had. It is the mythos of moderns.
Jennifer Stone
#22. The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#23. That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains.
Douglas Wilson
#24. You see gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history rather than simply repeat it. Humans can ... how do you moderns say it ... think outside the cup.
Rick Riordan
#25. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
G.K. Chesterton
#26. It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.
Kenny Smith
#28. The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.
Joseph Addison
#29. Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot
Ken Wilber
#30. Long ago it took a Copernicus to tell a provincial world that this planet was not the center of the universe. Some selfish moderns need a Copernican reminder that they are not the center of the universe either!
Neal A. Maxwell
#31. William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod,
Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell:
'The nakedness of woman is the work of God',
Or that title
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Allen Tate
#32. The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#33. To us post-moderns, empathy is a stranger in a strange land".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#34. and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers."44 Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego.
C. G. Jung
#35. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. In a post-modern culture we need an apologetic that is felt and seen because if post-moderns are not feeling it, they are not believing it.
Ravi Zacharias
#37. But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age
Lord Chesterfield
#39. People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
Heinrich Heine
#40. Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.
Dean Koontz
#41. To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.
Peter Kreeft
#42. A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
Margery Allingham
#43. The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#44. Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#45. Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.
Nicolas Chamfort
#46. We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
#47. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.
Allan Bloom
#48. I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.
Gustave Courbet
#49. 'It's this accursed Science,' I cried. 'It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.'
George Herbert
#51. In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#52. Neither ancients nor moderns who were good men have done such ,a deed that, after promising ,a daughter to one man, they have her to another, Nor, indeed, have we heard, even in former creations, of such ,a thing as the covert sale of a daughter for a fixed price, called a nuptial fee.
Guru Nanak
#53. If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
#54. If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.
A.S. Byatt
#55. The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
