A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.
Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.
I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.
The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.
Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
In the modern-day world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life.
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison?
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
In 2005 we have a once in a generation opportunity to deliver a modern Marshall plan for the developing world.
I don't think you can be a credible, modern candidate for president without making the environment a major part of your platform.
Most of the books that feature supernatural characters blending with the modern world and are usually set in big cities.
Modern warfare is by no means merely a matter of military operations. Economic affairs stand together with them in the first rank of the factors of importance.
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient book should be read only by the professionals, and the amateur should content himself with modern books.
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
