Modern Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

Henry David Thoreau

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

George Bernard Shaw

And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

G. K. Chesterton

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

Albert Einstein

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

G. K. Chesterton

On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.... In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, … one tremendous fact stands out – I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three to four times as many, at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13th April. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. … It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.

Winston Churchill

Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

Albert Einstein

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

G. K. Chesterton

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

Bertrand Russell

Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

John F. Kennedy

Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.

To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess.

I find that because of modern technological evolution and our global economy, and as a result of the great increase in population, our world has greatly changed: it has become much smaller. However, our perceptions have not evolved at the same pace; we continue to cling to old national demarcations and the old feelings of 'us' and 'them'.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

G. K. Chesterton

It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.

I tell you this morning, my friends, there's no way to get rid of Him. And all of our new knowledge will not diminish God's being one iota. Neither the microcosmic compass of the atom nor the vast interstellar ranges of interstellar space can make God irrelevant for living in a universe, where stellar distance must be measured in light years, where stars are five hundred million million miles from the earth, where heavenly bodies travel at incredible speeds. Modern man still has to cry out with the Psalmist, "When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands and all that thou hast created; what is man, that thou is mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou hast remembered him?"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.

William Ralph Inge

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Bertrand Russell

To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty not to a Family and a Fiction, but a loyalty to the Nation itself!
..."Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." [Czar Nicholas II]

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

G. K. Chesterton