Modern Life Quotations

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

It's often difficult to slough off all that we've acquired, all the comforts and safety nets modern life provides for us, and realize that in those days, people were living very much on the edge - life was incredibly hard!

As a young boy, scouting gave me a confidence and camaraderie that is hard to find in modern life.

That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.

A fact of modern life is that it takes women longer to get ready than men.

We should sell them to our worst enemies, the Russians and the Cubans.

The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.

The subject [of Los Angeles] became a general metaphor for anxiety and the speed of modern life.

My program is to leave the fools to nature. She has diseases with which to deal with them.

The ablest men in all walks of modern life are men of faith. Most of them have much more faith than they themselves realize.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.

Progress is a continuing effort to make the things we eat, drink, and wear as good as they used to be.

The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.

I grew up on Nickelodeon.On All That and Are You Afraid of the Dark, and Salute Your Shorts and Rocco's Modern Life and all that. That was my generation.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

Let's face it, though, anything that's apt to happen to an appliance like a blender isn't covered by the warranty anyway, so I never send them in. If it breaks, I'll buy a new one. That's the American way.

In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a 'disease of affluence', a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish

The human race never solves any of its problems, it only outlives them.

When I fly, I'm never afraid the plane is going to crash. But there have often been times when I was afraid it wouldn't crash. I was just afraid it was going to circle O'Hare for the rest of my life.

Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Modern life is confusing no "Ms take" about it.

A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.

When you are too old to play golf, you had better die.

You're getting old when you see a girl who looks like someone you used to know, and it turns out to be her daughter.

There's another advantage to being poor - a doctor will cure you faster.

True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.

The jumbo jet is the airborne equivalent of the interstate highway...One might as well be stuffed into a cartridge and shot through a pneumatic tube, like interoffice mail.

Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

Only uncomfortable chairs become antiques - the comfortable ones are worn out by hard use.

When Columbus took off, the purpose was to improve trade relations with China. That problem has not been solved to this very day, but just look at the by-products.

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

We can't test these absolute limits on humans. We can't blast them with sound. However, we can do that to animals because they don't have the same political base that we do.

This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.

Early to bed and early to rise, and you'll meet very few of the best people.

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

What about the poor salesman who is calling into the office from the corner saloon instead of the home sickbed he claims he is in?

If the shoe fits you're lucky.

A Tax Loophole: A deduction that the other guy gets.

Fish and guests in three days are stale.

Every patient reacts a little differently, both biologically and psychologically. The only constant in cancer is inconstancy; the only certainty is a future of uncertainty, a truism for all of modern life but one made vivid by life-threatening illness.

Have you ever known anyone who bought a fruitcake for himself? Of course not. They are purchased as Christmas gifts, mostly for people you don't particularly like.

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

Give your child a spanking once a day. If you don't know why, he does.

I'm gonna put all my money into taxes. They're sure to go up.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

...telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button.

Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.

I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention.

Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.

If we continue at this leisurly pace, we will have to pass Russian customs when we land on the moon.

Young normal tigers do not eat people. If eaten by a tiger you may rest assured he was abnormal.

The Beatles are not merely awful. I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful.

I had never considered marriage, but I had an open mind, and I was to learn after a brief try at it that most open minds should be closed for repairs.

All our troubles come from not being able to be alone.

Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.

If I had it [life] to do all over again, I'd have been a plumber.

Being concerned about other people is especially relevant in today's world. If we consider the complex inter-connected ness of our modern lives, how we depend on others and others depend on us, our outlook will change. We’ll begin to see 'others' not as somehow distant from us, but as people we are in touch with, people close to us; we will no longer feel indifferent to them.

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

Why take pride in cooking, when they don't take pride in eating?

The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia.

As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.

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.

Lincoln was known to have walked miles to borrow books, to get the most rudimentary form of education. So what do we do on his birthday? We close the schools!

They say kids today don't know the value of a dollar. They certainly do know the value of a dollar. That's why they ask for five.

One way to solve the traffic problem is to keep all the cars that are not paid for off the streets.

The good old horse-and-buggy days: then you lived until you died and not until you were run over.

Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.