Contemporary Values Quotes

Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

These days to be great is to exceed on prosperity; greatness today has nothing to do with moral magnanimity.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

What do people really believe in any more apart from sport and music?

I think that the Bible as a system of moral guidance in the 21st century is insufficient, to put it mildly. I feel quite strongly that we need a new moral lodestone if we can't rely on what is inside our own selves. Which I think, actually, is pretty reliable.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

Now thyself is more important than “Know thyself.

One must be of one's own time.

The old fairy tales are very, very violent, and these days I think we could do with a little less of it.

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.

I'm a 21st-century kid trapped in a 19th-century family.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

Culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from two thousand years ago as their best defense. When you have in front of you flesh and blood people who are your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, co-workers and neighbors and they love each other and they just want to go through life with someone.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.

We don't care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing.

Donald Trump's living in a different time, a time that is not a match for what Americans now believe about who our leaders should be.

In today’s day, patience is a new form of patriotism.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.