Modern Life Quotes

We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.

This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.

... modern life is no longer thinkable without photography.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

In my life I've easily lost 500 pounds but for some reason they keep finding me.

We have killed more people celebrating our independence day than we lost fighting for it.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head.

A pedestrian ought to be legally allowed to toss at least one hand grenade at a motorist every day.

There are no funny lawyers - only funny people who made a career mistake.

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.

Etiquette enables you to resolve conflict without just trading insults. Without etiquette, the irritations in modern life are so abrasive that you see people turning to the law to regulate everyday behavior. This frightens me; it's a major inroad on our basic freedoms.

Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others.

If we continue at this leisurly pace, we will have to pass Russian customs when we land on the moon.

A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

We are in danger of developing a cult of the Common Man, which means a cult of mediocrity.

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.

Even though modern life in many ways is nothing short of exhausting, we need to take responsibility for what is necessary to combat the stress and exhaustion of modern life.

Classless society is the dream of people with no class.

The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space.

Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production.

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Anti-Islamist Muslims - who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad - are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam's determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam.

Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.

Most parents don't worry about a daughter until she fails to show up for breakfast.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.

I think because the show ["Grant MacLaren"] is essentially a hopeful show. The show says that as bleak as the future is, the one thing that mankind developed was the ability to send their consciousness back and where a lot of the institutions of modern life have fallen apart.

It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it in a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on a system this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer him to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter.

Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

As a woman, for example, I live and work very much like a man. I take a lot of things from the man's world and I have to do that if I want to survive modern life. Conversely, men have to take things from the woman's world to survive. It's a very beautiful thing that you have to mold your own gender nowadays. But it's a very stressful thing for us.

Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium... Photograph and be photographed.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

There is no better way to return the matter of taxation to full public discusssion than to repeal the withholding taxes on wages and salaries. Only when the American people are confronted with the enormous excesses of government in a personal and direct way - by an annual bill for services rendered - will they be able to make an informed judgment about which services they want and which ones they can do without.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower.

People at all levels and in all roles in organizations are wrestling with the challenges of modern life, trying to find ways to create harmony among the different parts of their lives while aiming to achieve their goals and live with purpose.

Real Men no longer drive Corvettes. Despite being able to squander gas with the best of them, even today's least enlightened Real Man finds the notion of a $17,000 plastic car with no trunk somewhat absurd.

...telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button.

Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.