Modern Conveniences Quotes

I love stories that give me a perspective on how easy American life has become in the 21st century.

We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

There is an unlucky tendency ... to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.

Most people don't know where their food comes from. We're confused about the fundamentals. How does our food wind up on our plates? How exactly is it that, when I flick the switch, the lights come on?

Our creature comforts

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

All generations think the present moment is the greatest but also have this fascination with before their time. I do the same thing. I see old British movies. I'm like, 'Man, I would love to be in London at that time.' But then I wouldn't be able to watch 'The Walking Dead,' I wouldn't have cable, and my pizza options would be limited.

If it weren't for electricity, we'd all be watching television by candlelight.

You know what I hate? The outdoors. I mean, generally. I don't like outside. I'm an inside person. I'm all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy.

The ways of living have been rendered vastly easier by a multitude of inventions, by the increasing wealth of the country, by better and more intelligent service; and yet life is by no means easier, but indeed hard. The demands on time, whether real or imagined, have increased in a greater ratio than the supply of facilities for answering them, and as the earth provokingly continues to revolve on its axis just as rapidly as of old, the days are never long enough for all the duties which they bring.

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.

Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to have a bike.

Characters written in 1990 would be acting like idiots if they were cast into the present. For example, the reader might wonder: Why isn't she texting? Where's her cellphone? Can't she have a simple paternity test? For God's sake, look on the Internet and check him out!

It's fun being a princess, but it's not very practical! You're trudging through the forest and the mud and all of the elements. You kind of think, 'How did they do this back then?' Thank God I can put on my Nike trainers and walk around the rest of the day!

There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

I don't watch TV. I don't use a computer, a fax or a cellphone.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

I'm so thankful to have been born in the times that we live in.

I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.