Modern Times Quotes

“Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn't really know why they were living.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski, Kieslowski on Kieslowski

“Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River

“The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time --

'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!”
― Vera Nazarian

“[on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski

“In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“To be healthy in modern society, you must adopt the behaviors of an astronaut!”
― Steven Magee, Health Forensics

“In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski

“We are living in perilous times when the hearts and souls of men are sorely tried. Never before has the future been so utterly unpredictable; we are not so much in a period of transition with belief in progress to push us on, rather we seem to be entering the realm of the unknown, joylessly, disillusioned, and without hope. The whole world seems to be in a state of spiritual widowhood, possessed of the harrowing devastation of one who set out on life’s course joyously in intimate comradeship with another, and then is bereft of that companion forever.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, The Prodigal World

“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.”
― Steven Magee, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity

“Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“By now, with all our modern technology, there should be no poverty left on earth.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“In modern times, beauty is more trusted than goodness.”
― Amit Kalantri

“With approximately 50% of the USA population on prescription drugs and 10% on anti-depressants, it is clear that things are going seriously wrong with human health in the modern world.”
― Steven Magee, Health Forensics

“I like the way Twitter makes one be more concise.
It looks like someone is saying sometthing wise”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Mysterious Murder of Marilyn Monroe

“Faye keeps forgetting what she'll be giving up if she decides to stay here. Access to modern medicine, for starters. In 2015 people can survive cancer, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. Vaccines eradicated polio and measles. Do you really want to live in a world with iron lungs and polio, Faye? Do you?” “I guess I could go back to 2015 and live in a world with meth, heroin, terrorism, HIV and Ebola. Huge improvement, right?”
― Tiffany Reisz, The Night Mark

“Idol worship” is so deeply ingrained in the human brain synapses that it would be almost impossible to be bereft of it. And in absence of an external icon we are always going to look for it inside us. In fact, in many regions of the world this process is already in progress resulting in the pandemic of “self-admiration” and “self-deification” of our modern times.”
― Giannis Delimitsos, A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms

“A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we'd die of heartbreak.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Jesus Christ would not attract listeners today by preaching as the Son of God, but as the son of a carpenter.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“But who, in these modern times, slept well?”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Only expectation has value as currency,”
― Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

“Thus it is, when the moral restraints of religion and tradition, hierarchy and precedent, are removed, the power to suspend or unleash catastrophic events does not devolve on the impersonal benevolence of the masses but falls into the hands of men who are isolated by the very totality of their evil natures.”
― Paul Johnson

“You have to conclude that your country has run amuck, that the people responsible are insane, that you can not trust your leaders, your President, your general, your parents, your friends, your neighbors, you co-workers, your police, your town, your state, your country, anymore because it is liable to turn upon you for no reason at all, except that for its own security it needs a scapegoat, any scapegoat including you, and there is no appeal possible.”
― James Drought, The Secret

“It is in times like these that we face the most cunning of tricksters. We might even find a trickster in the seat of power.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“The Comedy of Errors has been consistently under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare, and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare