Modern Society Quotes

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

From the moment America went full-on industrial, it seems like it's been a steady path towards people never having to be physically present in order to satisfy their needs.

In the face of knowledge, science, and of the whole extent of radiant civilization, I cannot accept the presence in Turkey’s civilized community of people primitive enough to seek material and spiritual benefits in the guidance of sheikhs. The Turkish republic cannot be a country of sheikhs, dervishes and disciples.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs - and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin - with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.

Cultural relativism has made it so people don't know who they are anymore.

Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people - because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it - I don't care how good you are.

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

The most powerful idea in the modern world: All men are created equal.

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society

Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age.

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

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Men have become the tools of their tools.