Modern Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

Bertrand Russell

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

George Bernard Shaw

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

G. K. Chesterton

The primary aim of modern warfare... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.

G. K. Chesterton

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no "things." NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is "no-thingness". We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, an nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness — no-thingness — is a form of process, ever moving.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

Upheaval after upheaval has reminded up that modern man is traveling along the road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

G. K. Chesterton

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

G. K. Chesterton

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

John F. Kennedy

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

G. K. Chesterton

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

G. K. Chesterton

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.

Thomas Jefferson

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Henry David Thoreau

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.

Bertrand Russell

It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.

Bertrand Russell

The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

G. K. Chesterton

Speaking of the spirit that informs modern scientific investigations, I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling, and that without such a feeling they would not be fruitful. I also believe that, this kind of religiousness, which makes itself felt today in scientific investigations, is the only creative religious activity of our time. The art of today can hardly be looked upon at all as expressive of our religious instincts.

Albert Einstein

To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in every nook- my ambition, my torture, and my happiness

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

Winston Churchill