Not every President is a great speaker. Not every President is a great thinker. But in the modern era, every single President is a master of one thing: eye contact.
In modern parlance we speak of the interconnectedness of all life, suggesting that one cannot really be healthy when the environment is sick.
Modern American culture dictated the importance of touching the hand of someone you’ve just met, however counterintuitive it seemed. Why would he want to touch someone he didn’t know?
He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?
The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution.
The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.
In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
A modern definition of equanimity: cool. This refers to one whose mind remains stable & calm in all situations.
How to get and keep men interested in you (A Guide for the Modern Woman): Put them in the “friend” or “fuck” zone. Leave them there.
The difference between the modern laws and those of the past is that wisdom is no longer a respected requirement and it has become secondary in importance to bureaucratic procedure.
There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
That big hit 'Get Lucky' is a disco song - not only the melody and the whole concept, but we had one of the great disco guys and one of the best guitarists ever, Nile Rodgers, to play on it. So that's great disco, but a modern disco, because it has g...
My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.
