For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
A good number of my friends are married, which seems very old-fashioned.
Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.
From a Christian perspective, the answer to all of that is not power, as it is in the modern perspective. It's love. It's self-sacrifice. That's what love is all about. The marriage ceremony says it very well: sacrifice is difficult, but love can make it a joy.
To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.
That old saying about opportunity only knocking once is as archaic as the flat-earth theory and as patently untrue. Opportunity knocks all the time - and it rings your doorbell, calls you up, and sends you e-mails.
Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.
In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.
One of my mom's favorite movies growing up was 'Big' with Tom Hanks. I thought, 'Oh, OK, what if we do something like that but not like that. Something more modern, with a different perspective, and maybe with an all-black cast.'
The Corcoran show was actually almost a reportage. The exhibit was, in many ways, pretty unique. It was one of the first pieces about DC culture that doesn't include some marble building or the Kennedy Center.
No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.
I'm not interested in the past, I'm interested in the future. Europe is past.
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
[Paper Girls] needed to have a certain kind of almost neon style to it, but at the same time we wanted also to show the modern perspective that we had.
To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.
We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.
I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.
