Modern Life Quotes

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.”
― Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

“When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.”
― Roger Hedden, Bodies, Rest and Motion.

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]”
― Harper Lee

“What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”
― Edward Abbey

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between…Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued-that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more production, or faster-paced…I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac”
― Cristiane Serruya, The Modern Man: A philosophical divagation about the evil banality of daily acts

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.”
― Roman Payne

“There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“We have become a nation of thoughtless rushers, intent on doing before thinking, and hoping what we do magically works out. If it doesn’t, we rush to do something else, something also not well thought-out, and then hope for more magic.”
― Len Holman

“When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.”
― Michael Harris

“People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."

[Afterword]”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”
― Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

“...apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953...The wonders portrayed in THE JETSONS, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass...Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

“New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“From here on out, Reena's life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary - smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter. Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for.”
― Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear

“I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life”
― Frank O'Hara

“Don’t let the modern love change you too much that you forget what it is to live with kindness and compassion.

From (The Awakening)”
― Jyoti Patel

“In a fast world, learning should move fast too.”
― Angelika Regossi, In English as in Russian: 1000 words with explanations - ПО-АНГЛИЙСКИ КАК ПО-РУССКИ: 1000 слов с пояснениями

“If you need a digital audience to feel like a winner, you've already lost the game of self-respect.”
― Fazal Nasir, The Frictionless Life: 25 Essays on Character, Virtue, and the Art of Being Unshakable: Stop Chasing the Hustle. Start Building a Soul.

“Same stories. Different fonts.

— Gerald P Creel Jr., The Noise: Notes from One Tuesday”
― Gerald P Creel Jr

“Same stories. Different fonts.

— The Noise: Notes from One Tuesday”
― Gerald P Creel Jr

“We live in an era where everyone is terrified of being caught trying. So, the defense mechanism is to pretend you never gave a shit in the first place.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“The basic move of liberalism is to replace the social centre (normal people) with the margin (foreigners, minorities, deviants) forever. The stack does that by shielding these marginal identities from any criticism ever, and it is an especially clear example of the monstrous principle of equity at work. If you assume that there are fundamentally no differences between people, any difference in outcomes must be evidence of secret, hidden oppression. The obese, HIV+ otherkin with 80 IQ isn’t ignored because she’s creepy and stupid, it’s because of “systemic bias”, and she needs to be platformed for you to hear her wonderful ideas. It all sounds insane when laid out in plain language, but the same principle is at work in something that many decent and well-adjusted people would defend: civil rights law.”
― Mike Maxwell, The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought