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Modern Quotes

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Modern Quotes

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

“Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.”

“The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.”

Modern Activity Practicals Cult Defiance Disinterested Moralist

Book:The Treason of the Intellectuals

Source: The Treason of the Intellectuals

“Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Renan's verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage.”

“Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky

“The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call "interesting." He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down.”

Men Wells Politics Term Interesting Economy Issues Modern Security Activity Difficulty Credit Proportion Liberalism Banking Rivals Pledge Banking System Controllers

Book:The Crisis Of Civilization

Source: The Crisis Of Civilization

“New information technologies-including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls-have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems.”

“It becomes evident that when the Life-power awakens its mysterious activity at the beginning of a cycle of manifestation those vibrations which we recognise as sound come into existence before the more rapid pulsations of electricity and light. Thus modern science confirms the ancient occult teaching that sound is the root of physical existence. 'It is out of Sound that every form comes, and it is in Sound that every form lives.”

Light Form Sound Existence Teaching Modern Activity Roots Ancient Mysterious Manifestation Cycles Electricity Evident Rapids Vibrations Recognise Occult Modern Science

Author:Paul Foster Case

“Men's bodies are our women's works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds ... War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer.”

“Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.”

Government Modern Activity Nine

Book:The Problem of China

Source: The Problem of China

“To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.”

“In this age of space flight, when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible... remains in every way an up-to-date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the Moon also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral law of God.”

“The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.”

“Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.”

Ifs Thinking Mind States Today Past Space Gone Virtue Modern Activity Gains Notion Arrogance Decay Time And Space Passivity Banality Profundity Classifying

Author:Russell Jacoby

“Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.”

Art Today Modern Conditions Activity Photography Fundamentals Speed Splits Modern Art

Book:Lisette Model

Source: Lisette Model

“If greed were not the master of modern man, how could it be that the frenzy of economic activity does not abate as higher standards of living are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?”

Ifs Men Doe Economic Modern Masters Higher Activity Standards Advantage Greed Pursue Standards Of Living Frenzy Modern Man Higher Standards Ruthlessness Small Is Beautiful

Author:E. F. Schumacher