Selected modern life quotes

1. I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.

2. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

3. Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

4. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

5. It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

6. Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains - except kill it.

7. What we will be seeking ... for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.

8. Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.

9. 'Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals. '

10. There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

11. Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second. (p. 81)

12. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.'

13. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now. Outside there are sirens. Someone's been run over. The century grinds on.

14. 'An ordinary man can in a day's time travel by train from a dead little town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo:' ~ Filippo Tommaso (F.T.) Marinetti, Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom (June 1913)

15. A strange fellow, this Degas - sickly, a bundle of nerves, with such weak eyes that he is afraid of going blind, yet for these very reasons extremely sensitive to the character of things. He is more skillful in capturing the essence of modern life than anyone I know.

16. Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities - a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at - plain to the sight but sealed like an egg - is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.

17. Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are ever at their wit's end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature.

18. Well, me too, at times, I have to admit, I'm a victim of the pressures of modern life. I know that one of these days something's going to snap in my head and I'll start imagining that I'm a two and a half mile section of the East Lancs Road or something - or Phil Collins, whichever is the least interesting. (after playing 'Rat Race' by Sizzler)

19. Electrically speaking, there's nothing but nuzzling and cuddling and cooing, alternating with wild yells for love and food and help. It's always May Day in the global nursery. (1974)

20. There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.

21. Life nowadays goes at a gallop; and the way in which this affects literature is to make it extremely superficial and slovenly.

22. We're all too busy working, entertaining ourselves With forty hours of television and prescription pills Well, I take two a day to help my brain behave It never does, but who's to say? At least my doctor gets paid.

23. In Fleet Street, in Fleet Street, the People are so fleet They barely touch the cobble-stones with their nimble feet!

24. Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

25. We sat in the car park till twenty to one And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

26. 'Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.' (p. 397)

27. Once you get over the fallacy of the convenience of modern-day life, living more ethically becomes a liberating antidote to the live-to-work consumer culture.

28. Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

29. There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born, Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn; And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.