“Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.” PeopleWellsIdeasMillionsModernFiguresDesignMaterialsProductsDependsHigherStandardsContraryWell BeingStationsFewerLocationMundaneSupermarketsStandards Of LivingGasolineHigher StandardsIncorporation Author:Thomas Sowell
“For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.” WorldYearsArtFacesStepsModernObjectsDependsElementsHundredMovedLeavingPainterArrangementsHostilityMonumentModernismImitatingSuperbIncessant Book:The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell Source: The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell
“An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.” MenBelieveWellsPhilosophyMightAgePastCertainThreeViewsHalfFourModernCenturyDependsHabitClockCosmosCreedsDogmaMondayControversySuitableTuesdayCredibleImbeciles Book:The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton Source: The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton
“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.” PeopleWorldWayGivingHumansPersonsHas BeensImportantRealFeelingsCausesCommunityModernDependsBlameResponseIsolationReal WorldGiving BackCompetenceModern LifeCommentatorsVirtual RealityImportant PersonVirtual World Author:Jonathan Gottschall
“People think that they have no right to judge a fact - all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.” PeopleThinkingTryingHeartStatesMomentsFactsRaceAcceptingModernExpressionJudgingDependsWorshipDollarsProductionsDivinityProletariat Author:Jacques Ellul
“[Scottish songs] are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.” SongModernEffectsDependsScottishEccentricity Author:Robert Burns
“One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.” BelieveHas BeensDoneFeelingsReligionTurnsWomenModernEffectsSweetDependsIntellectualCommunicateInventionTherapyDistinctionRelativeProtestantism Author:Flannery O'Connor
“Many anti-energy groups display little appreciation of the extent to which modern economies depend pervasively on the use of fossil fuels and petrochemical products.” LittlesUseEnergyEconomyGroupsModernProductsDependsAppreciationFuelDisplayFossilsFossil FuelBurning Fossil Fuels Author:Robert Higgs
“This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.” RomanceModernDependsStaffModern Society Author:Marilyn Johnson