Contemporary Quotes

Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.

An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."

The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .

Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

Many contemporary painters feel that their landscapes come from within and are brought to the surface and given form as a result of various stimuli. The artist's internal world is waiting to be evoked by whatever means the artist finds most productive, and... this world is just as important as the outer, visible world.

When I try to sound like the contemporary sound, it never turns out that way. That's just me.

It's hard to find actors that don't feel contemporary when you put them in a period piece.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.

There are two primary ways of studying Zen. Either an individual will enter into a Zen monastery and study with a Zen master there, or they will study with a Zen master who lives in the contemporary world.

Jesus is not a memory. He is an actual, contemporary, reachable Person. He is the living Christ, who has the power to enter into people's lives and change and lift them up.

The artistic formulae wear thin quickly and yet daily the artist - when developing his own foundation - must enter his own time and the problems of other contemporary artists. Paths cross and the soil of time is starting to be turned.

I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn't operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it's actually also true - if I want to appear in public I want to look my best. If I'm onstage I like to do contemporary work, largely because of the trousers, because of the clothes. I like a decent, what we used to call a lounge suit. Then I can start to motor.

Every work brings new and different challenges. Research is always helpful, regardless of whether the play is contemporary or not.

One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sane standing in front of you and politely engaging with you. People react.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

I've always loved writing emotionally rich, character-driven novels that explore the way people fall in love and deal with life's triumphs and tragedies. I enjoy writing the contemporary and historical books equally, though perhaps 'enjoy' is the wrong word.

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

There's this idea that when you turn 40, you automatically go to adult contemporary heaven, but I want to try and challenge that.

I write 'by the seat of my pants.' I love to do research. I am inspired by contemporary writers and contemporary events. I live in the real world.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age.

I did a series called Ned and Stacey for two years for Fox back in the 90s. I was writer on it as well as a producer, and it was very important to me that there were no contemporary references.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

One feels very blessed to be born into a family like the Birla family, which is a household name in India, which stands for tradition, is yet contemporary, stands for trust.

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothing in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.

Too much reasoning has spoiled the contemporary mind. People have lost their hearts and faith.

The contemporary hero, the mythical pattern in the imitation of whom we would live, remains as yet undefined. We have no hero; what is more to the point, we suspect hero worship.

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.

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.

Discipleship' as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I've tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.

On the one hand, we had great filmic spectacles that brought in big audiences, adults as well as primary and secondary school students. On the other hand, there were attempts to create contemporary Polish film.

Now I do not myself share that superstitious reverence for the beliefs of common sense which many contemporary philosophers profess. But I think that we must start from them, and that we ought to depart from them only when we find good reason to do so.

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.

The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.

Whenever I read statistical reports, I try to imagine my unfortunate contemporary, the Average Person, who, according to these reports, has 0.66 children, 0.032 cars, and 0.046 TVs.

Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam.

...Venice has been the living future of contemporary American history since its inception.

It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.

Having Alexei Ratmansky create a new Romeo and Juliet for The National Ballet of Canada to mark our 60th anniversary is a dream come true. His aesthetic -- steeped in the Russian school but open to contemporary sources -- is ideal for this work and for our company, which, with our classical heritage and our passion for the modern, is perfectly suited to his distinctive dance vision.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.