M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Modern society tends to operate in ways that isolate us in our littleness. We are encouraged to be consumers and economic units. We are assailed by advertising which carries the constant message that individual indulgence is all that matters. All this serves to weaken our spirit and put our world at risk. As our society becomes more and more spiritually impoverished, it is like a forest drying out in the heat of summer. The danger of a forest fire grows.
(…)
If the story we are living is not important, then our life will peter into apathy and we will be defenceless against tyranny and oppression.
(…)
There will always be bad big stories waiting to sweep us away. Indeed, we are already involved in them. By being consumer citizens we collude with all manner of ill: factory farming, armaments production, environmental damage, wars to protect oil supplies, third world debt, to name but a few. It is important to do better than this, to find a more noble story.
(…)
The Buddha enabled many people to see possibilities for their lives that they had not perceived before they met him. That is the function of a sage. He was able to speak the other person's language and to see their life in terms of the bigger picture how new meaning could be injected into the person's little story so that it began to serve the great story of peace and compassion in the world. He was an inspirer.”
Source: The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity and Passion
“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle.”
“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these attitudes cause. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.”
“Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.”
Source: The free and prosperous commonwealth: an exposition of the ideas of classical liberalism
“Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”
Source: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production
“Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.”
Source: Adam Smith and Modern Sociology: A Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences
“Modern sports betting is so dangerous specifically because it is available online.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Modern sports betting is so dangerous specifically because it is available online. Sports betting today bears little resemblance to the smoke-filled sportsbooks tucked inside Las Vegas casinos. Players can bet on almost everything, from how the Jacksonville Jaguars will do next season (probably poorly) to the speed of the next pitch or which team will score the next basket. Online sports betting offers almost no friction, providing little to encourage players to slow down and take stock of their play. Instead, the apps present an endless stream of action at the touch of a button. “I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten into it if I couldn’t do it online,” Kyle noted, recalling how carefully he has bet each of the handful of times he has been to a casino. He compared these trips to his all-night betting sessions chasing losses with four-figure bets on minor-league British darts. The online accessibility was “everything.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.”
“Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.”
“Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas”
“Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition”
Source: After Virtue
“Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”
Source: In Praise of Idleness
“Modern techniques have torn down state frontiers, both economical and intellectual. The growth of means of transport has created a world market and an opportunity for division of labor embracing all the developed and most of the undeveloped states.”
“Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.”
“Modern technology has conveniently provided a measuring stick by which you can determine whether or not you are conducting your business in an acceptable, ethical way. . . . You can ask yourself: How will I feel if my business dealings today are secretly recorded on a hidden video camera, and appear on this evening's television newscast for all to see?”
“Modern theologians are like a pack of dogs who spend most of their time sniffing each other's behinds.”
“Modern thinking is that time did not start with the big bang, and that there was a multiverse even before the big bang. In the inflation theory, and in string theory, there were universes before our big bang, and that big bangs are happening all the time. Universes are formed when bubbles collide or fission into smaller bubles.”
“Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets.”
“Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.”
Source: Selected Essays of John Berger
“Modern thought, with its distrust of anything that escapes rational analysis, has practically eliminated the word ‘soul’ from its vocabulary—an elimination not unrelated of course to the chronic sterility or bankruptcy of this thought in the face of what is the first concern of any philosophical speculation worthy of the name: the question of our living identity. The Christian authors, however, on whom I draw for the substance of this chapter were more wholly engaged in the pursuit of our living identity than we tend to be. For them the soul is that highly charged complex of thought, feeling and sensitivity with which God endows us at birth. It is all that in me by virtue of which I am conscious of myself, through which and by means of which I experience myself as a living reality, as an ‘I am’. It is in fact the one reality about which I can have a sure and direct knowledge. About everything else I may have doubts; but I cannot—unless I am a lunatic—question the reality of my own soul, because simply to ask the question implies the existence of the questioner.”
Source: The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
“Modern times are dominated by Satan and will be more so in the future. The conflict with hell cannot be engaged by men, even the most clever. The Immaculata alone has from God the promise of victory over Satan. However, assumed into Heaven, the Mother of God now requires our cooperation. She seeks souls who will consecrate themselves entirely to her, who will become in her hands effective instruments for the defeat of Satan and the spreading of God's kingdom upon earth.”
“Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.”
“Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system”
Source: State of Exception
“Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango - with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.”
“Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.”
Source: Alarms and Discursions
“Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.”
“Modern travel businesses need more than access to inventory — they need technology that moves as fast as their clients do.”
“Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.”
Source: Modern Painters ...: pt. 4. Of many things
“Modern value-neutral society (Gesellschaft rather than Gemeinschaft) is systematized predation tempered not by conscience or values but rather merely by a system of law, which is no less corrupt with private interests and its own forms of predation. In modernity sophism is the order of the day, and this obliges its most adept practitioners to learn how to develop the art of appearing to be other than one actually is.”
“Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.”
“Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.”
“Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.”
Source: William James: Essays and Lectures
“Modern warfare is an intricate business about which no one knows everything and few know very much.”
“Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)”
Source: Mirror Dance
“Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals.”
Source: On War
“Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.”
Source: Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men.”
“Modern whites coddle hate and prejudice,
and use free speech as justification.
If any humane white ever questions hate,
they're branded, woke traitor to the nation.
Till this day, white people manufacture
99% of the world's human rights violations.
If you right the wrong, it's cussed as wokeness,
To support white terrorism is patriotism.”
Source: World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
“Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification.”
“Modern women - we're very good at keeping ourselves busy. There are PTA meetings, exercising, bake sales at school. I like that my life is not the same every day.”
“Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that.”
“Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best mothers, speak seven languages, and be able to understand derivatives. And we don't really have women we're modeling after, so we're all looking for how to do this.”
“Modern women are squeezed between the devil and the deep blue sea, and there are no lifeboats out there in the form of public policies designed to help these women combine their roles as mothers and as workers.”
“Modern women like to think we invented the idea of balancing work and family but women have always done it.”
“Modern world allows women to be subjected to rape through the eyes, minds, hands, and words of men.”
“Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.”
Source: The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., comprehending an account of his studies, and numerous works, in chronological order: a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published; the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which he flourished
“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.”
Source: A Collection of Essays
“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”
Source: The Zen Monastic Experience
“Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?”