46 Quotes About Modern Society

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime–if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more–was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside. Jess C. Scott

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. . C.s. Lewis

Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being. . Arthur Rosenfeld

In the transformed world political context of today, it is more essential than ever that the critique of democracy in the name of difference developed by oppositional intellectuals be formulated so carefully that these thoughts cannot be exploited for nationalist, tribalist, and xenophobic purposes. It is imperative that the politics of the 'differend' not be settled beyond and at the margins of democratic politics. Unknown

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing. Colson Whitehead

Modernity is kind of a tradition and tradition itself is not a rulebook. It's a dialogue and a dialectical process– just as tradition affects us, we too affect tradition and culture, and we change it. Sharanya Haridas

Modern society is modern because of its mental cocktail of reasoning and compassion. Turn the compassion network in the brain off, and it will be a society of heartless robots. On the other hand, turn the reasoning network off, and it will be a society of dumb sentimental apes. Abhijit Naskar

The modern human lives in a cesspool of man-made electromagnetic radiation. Steven Magee

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. Wallace Stegner

With approximately 50% of the USA population on prescription drugs and 10% on anti-depressants, it is clear that things are going seriously wrong with human health in the modern world. Steven Magee

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation. Rebecca Solnit

Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life. Anthon St. Maarten

The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can't control what grows in it, but we don't have to watch either. Tiffany Madison

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting–to bring out the lowest common denominator in people–so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone. Zoltan Istvan

Unfortunately, you are far more likely to be harmed or die prematurely as a direct result of modern society than you are from any form of terrorism. Steven Magee

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd. Zoltan Istvan

We expect more from technology and less from each other. Sherry Turkle

...when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.'  Kate Chopin

People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it. Alexei Maxim Russell

Of course. A new consciousness - I that that is the word, ' said the old man after he had thought a moment. 'That is what I hope it is. You and your African and Colombian, you are speaking the same language now, you know the same ideas. You are conscious that life on earth is flux. Men are better educated. They are more disciplined than in the past - their schedules are harder, their lives move faster, efficiency digs into them. Men are more sophisticated -every day they have more alternatives to choose among than they can possibly exhaust. Through psychiatry they know their strengths and weaknesses. They know the risks of every choice. This is what I mean by consciousness. Men know so much about everything they do. It was much simpler when they didn't know, when they simply acted out of instinct, believed from instinct, loved from instinct, brought up children by their instincts. Perhaps people were even happier. But now we are more conscious. We have got to live with our greater knowledge. We have got to live with our greater freedom. Michael Novak

Litchat, however, is singleminded. Seemingly, it can only conceive of a writer’s persona as one thing at a time: a prick, a detached brainiac, a suffering saint. Litchat is adamant, yes, and impervious to factual challenges, but that tends to be true of all strong opinions formed on a basis of incomplete and selective evidence. The weaker our footing, the more fiercely we defend it. We believe it not because it fits what we know–we know next to nothing, after all–but because we need to believe this particular thing at this particular time, regardless of what the truth may be. It suits our purposes to do so, and one of those purposes may be as flimsy as the desire to be excused from reading the books in question before telling the world what we think of them. Laura Miller

At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you've read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust. . Dexter Palmer

This is what made the difference, they used social networking for entertainment and I used it for business. Amit Kalantri

We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation. Anthon St. Maarten

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age. Alexei Maxim Russell

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything . It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it. Gordon Hempton

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We’re not crazy. We’re just not in the dark anymore. And my goodness, we can see you so clearly now. Saeed Jones

It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. George Orwell

Using love as a bait and replacing respect with ego-pampering makes you a skillful social animal; unfortunately, all kinds of animals are less evolved than human beings. Would you like to evolve? Saurabh Sharma

Saying of the ProphetPrivacyWhoever invades people´s privacy corrupts them. Idries Shah

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural, " not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! . Wallace Stegner

Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire.(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices. John Gray

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

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously .. . But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to trumpet our own opinions, to win attention by broadcasting our laziest and cruelest judgments, to grind axes in public. It has made us feel, in some perverse sense, that we are entitled to do so. Steve Almond

According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention. Matthew B. Crawford

To be healthy in modern society, you must adopt the behaviors of an astronaut! Steven Magee

Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose–how you’re selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn’t your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more. Shalom Auslander

In the city, strangers seldom meet beyond daily functions. Instead, they brush by with a haste and preoccupation that so defines a century of 'too little time'. Joshua Krook