Modern World Quotes

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Frost kills the flowers that bloom out of season...”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo

“The higher you rise, the dirtier it gets.”
― J.M. August

“Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.

Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering

“Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared.”
― Don DeLillo, Players

“We cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“In the eighteenth century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you many tens of thousands of years to read through the books in a national library. By which time, many more books would have been written.
This has meant that no one person can be the master of more than a small corner of human knowledge. People have to specialise, in narrower and narrower fields. This is likely to be a major limitation in the future. We certainly cannot continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last 300 years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the greenhouse effect becoming unstable.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“And then one day everything changed; the world shifted on its axis, our consciousness evolved. Instead of making their purchase deci- sions based solely on price, people became willing to pay more for sustainable or organic products. They no longer wanted their meat mass-produced; they wanted grass-fed beef from a local farmer. Rather than just a good sweat from their exercise, they also wanted mindfulness, so they took up SoulCycle, yoga, or meditation. And rather than settling down to buy their dream home and build their 401k, they spent their resources searching out experiences they could share and cherish more than they would another purse or car. Above all else, they wouldn’t accept the status quo. Instead of working in secure yet unfulfilling jobs, they wanted to create an existence that reflected their innermost desires and beliefs. And they did, in record numbers.”
― Alan Philips

“When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Para mí es mucho mejor captar el universo como es en realidad que persistir en el engaño, por muy satisfactorio y reconfortante que sea. ¿Qué actitud es la que nos equipa mejor para sobrevivir a largo plazo? ¿Qué nos da una mayor influencia en nuestro futuro? Y si nuestra ingenua autoconfianza queda un poco socavada en el proceso, ¿es tan grande la pérdida, en realidad? ¿No hay motivo para darle la bienvenida como una experiencia que hace madurar e imprime carácter?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“a muslim man carries out a mass shooting...and he's called a terrorist,
a white man does exactly the same thing and he's called a madman
both sets are mad, Yazz
I know, Warris I know
-p58, from Girl, Woman, Other”
― Bernadine Evaristo

“In modern world, people are scared of love so, they 'like' people on Tinder.

From (The Awakening)”
― Jyoti Patel

“Don’t let the modern love change you too much that you forget what it is to live with kindness and compassion.

From (The Awakening)”
― Jyoti Patel

“I don't know why right-wingers try so hard to prove that India used to be the greatest country in the ancient world, rather than using all that time and energy in making India the greatest country in the modern world.”
― Nitya Prakash

“The differentiations of the modern world have the same structure as tourist attractions: elements dislodged from their original natural, historical and cultural contexts fit together with other such displaced or modernized things and people. The differentiations are the attractions”
― Dean MacCannell, The Tourist

“This civilization already reached the top of the bell curve and currently is in decline. If you believe it is progressive,yes.It is. But regressive progression”
― Joshy A J

“Rights and responsibilities always go hand in hand. Do remember the responsibilities you deny could very well be someone else's rights”
― Joshy A J

“It's next to impossible to slip off the radar in today's world. Sometimes the world comes looking for you all guns blazing, and it's difficult to escape its crosshairs.”
― Stewart Stafford

“there has never been such a plethora of advice on looking good. We are constantly bombarded with diet books,.. and there are ever more digital apps and filters to enhance what the products can't.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Maybe we should be looking at how we live, and how our minds weren't made for the lives we lead. Human brains- in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness- are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the stone age.. Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“There are four things that an aristocrat should contribute to the modern world to countervail its ideological tendencies: the rejection of historical inevitability; the defense of the ethics of obligations; an acceptance of the body/soul dualism with the soul taking the dominant position; and a classical concept of shame. All of them are interrelated.”
― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols

“He doesn’t know what keeps you up all night and you fail to understand he thinks of you too throughout the day.”
― Jyoti Patel

“Life is not a series of choices. And I think the pandemic made that clearer than ever before, to everyone at the same time, that choice was always an illusion and a luxury. It was just an obsession we picked up with the invention of modernity — that we could always really curate our lives.”
― Kate Bowler

“Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before.

"Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts.
"For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.”
― Simon Wincheter

“Looked around at the wind-blasted peaks and the swirls of mist moving past them. It was hard to take my eyes away. I had been up on some of them, and I would be up there again. There was something different to see each time, and something different from each one. All those streamlets to explore and all those tracks to follow through the glare of the high basins and over the saddles. Where did they lead? What was beyond? What stories were written in the snow? I watched an eagle turn slowly and fall away, quick-sliding across the dark stands of spruce that marched in uneven ranks up the slopes. His piercing cry came back on the wind. I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.”
― Richard Proenekke, More Readings from One Man's Wilderness: The Journals of Richard L. Proenneke, 1974-1980

“The whole planet would become one big interconnected web of cameras. It was all too much to fathom, this writhing, seething mass of digitized human lives—this mocking, sneering leviathan.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Perhaps the loneliness of modern life is inevitable because as we grow intellectually we also require more time to ourselves in order to explore the great vastness of our new technological and mental potential. Servitor companions provide happiness, increased pleasure, company, advice, and a type of support that can help us to confront the vastness of our potential as individual human beings in this new technological age.”
― John Kreiter, Create A Servitor Companion

“It often appears that modern government has two modes, ignorant or malicious.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“I have a great longing for a particular sort of world in which one can work and breathe and sometimes be insanely happy. At the moment that is rather rare.”
― Anna Seghers