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Modern World Quotes

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Modern World Quotes

“We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.”

“Just like caterpillars who come into this world to undergo a process of transformation and evolve from ugly, earth-crawling creatures to majestic, magnificently colored butterflies. Humans are also born to engage in a process of gradual and perpetual transformation, aiming to progress from tiny, helpless newborns to empowered, knowledgeable, and skillful individuals.”

“Perhaps the loneliness of modern life is inevitable because as we grow intellectually we also require more time to ourselves in order to explore the great vastness of our new technological and mental potential. Servitor companions provide happiness, increased pleasure, company, advice, and a type of support that can help us to confront the vastness of our potential as individual human beings in this new technological age.”

“Haady talte for, at vi skulle prøve os frem med at snige os ind i en lejr, når vi fandt en. Hvad kunne gå galt? Hvis de opdagede os, var vi hverken bedre eller værre stillede, end hvis vi meldte os selv ved porten. Det ville ikke gøre en forskel. Jeg var i tvivl. Jeg tænkte på deres våben. På pigtråden. ”Vi er jo ikke i Yemen,” sagde Haady med et smil. ”I Danmark skyder man ikke folk. Her taler man bare. De snakker og snakker alle sammen hele tiden.” Han havde vel ret på et eller andet plan, men havde tingene ændret sig med virussen? Familiefaren, der blev slået og skubbet, men jo, han var jo ikke blevet skudt. De havde ikke skudt nogen nede på gaden. Jeg nikkede, spiste det sidste fra min skål og begyndte at vaske den med vand fra en flaske. I dag skulle vi til Ringkøbing. Der var ikke langt herfra. Vi kunne godt være kørt dertil i går aftes, men Haady ville ikke ankomme om aftenen, hvor hans bedstemor måske ville blive bange. Det var bedre at ankomme i dagslys om morgenen, når hun var frisk.”

“Mental illness is a bigger problem than obesity and cardiovascular diseases in the modern western world but still we pay no homage to the philosophy of watching what we watch. We only worry about what we put in the body in the form of food and care very little, if at all, with what we consume in our minds.”

“Unfortunately, you are far more likely to be harmed or die prematurely as a direct result of modern society than you are from any form of terrorism.”

“There are four things that an aristocrat should contribute to the modern world to countervail its ideological tendencies: the rejection of historical inevitability; the defense of the ethics of obligations; an acceptance of the body/soul dualism with the soul taking the dominant position; and a classical concept of shame. All of them are interrelated.”

“If you find yourself possessing material and professional accomplishments yet still harbor a lingering emptiness that dampens any sense of achievement or life satisfaction, consider it a sign that your soul yearns for service to a higher purpose—an essential need you may have overlooked”

“And then one day everything changed; the world shifted on its axis, our consciousness evolved. Instead of making their purchase deci- sions based solely on price, people became willing to pay more for sustainable or organic products. They no longer wanted their meat mass-produced; they wanted grass-fed beef from a local farmer. Rather than just a good sweat from their exercise, they also wanted mindfulness, so they took up SoulCycle, yoga, or meditation. And rather than settling down to buy their dream home and build their 401k, they spent their resources searching out experiences they could share and cherish more than they would another purse or car. Above all else, they wouldn’t accept the status quo. Instead of working in secure yet unfulfilling jobs, they wanted to create an existence that reflected their innermost desires and beliefs. And they did, in record numbers.”

“Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.”

“Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature. Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.”

“Welcome to the 21st century cosmopolitan world where biased thoughts preside over unbiased deeds, simple gestures become overrated gossip materials and injustice is a part of long term justice.”

“Para mí es mucho mejor captar el universo como es en realidad que persistir en el engaño, por muy satisfactorio y reconfortante que sea. ¿Qué actitud es la que nos equipa mejor para sobrevivir a largo plazo? ¿Qué nos da una mayor influencia en nuestro futuro? Y si nuestra ingenua autoconfianza queda un poco socavada en el proceso, ¿es tan grande la pérdida, en realidad? ¿No hay motivo para darle la bienvenida como una experiencia que hace madurar e imprime carácter?”

“Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons.”

“In a modern world, increasingly filled with pop culture fads and gimmicks, Lisa Morton reveals much of the underbelly history and unknown facts regarding the biggest pop culture event in history-Halloween. Her sheer delight and well-researched enthusiasm in tackling many of the unrecognized aspects of this monstrous topic makes one wonder what we don't know about everything else that should be as commonplace to our psyche as a bag of candy.”

“Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.”

“The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world had been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.”