Contemporary Quotes - page 28
To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement. The generation which is going off the stage has deserved well of mankind for the struggles it has made, and for having arrested the course of despotism which had overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years. If there seems to be danger that the ground they have gained will be lost again, that danger comes from the generation your contemporary. But that the enthusiasm which characterizes youth should lift its parricide hands against freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and country.
Thomas Jefferson
In this extraordinary volume, Elizabeth Martinez reveals what has thus far been hidden from our view, the rich and inspiring history of Chicana women, from the early days of the Spanish conquest to the contemporary struggles for immigrant rights. The book is a treasure trove of exciting information and striking images. It should become an indispensable part of everyone's library, and a special gift to future generations of the young, on whom we depend to change the world.
Howard Zinn
Carnap made a detailed analysis of Heidegger's statement, "Nothing nihilates,” in order to show that it is purely verbal, devoid of empirical meaning. (Incidentally, this is the only sentence from existentialist philosophy the majority of contemporary positivists appear familiar with.)
Leszek Kołakowski
Of course, this collection of contemporary, often politically motivated articles and statements does not have any proof value. At best, some of the names under the articles could constitute an "argument of authority”, but even that is diluted by their juxtaposition with political agitators and plain cranks. More than an argumentation, this presentation of many conflicting opinions is a dispersionary tactic to keep the opposing party busy with refuting the weirdest viewpoints.
Koenraad Elst
Leave alone Urdu pamphlets, a neatly published English book from the impeccably Islamic Noor Publishing House (Delhi), Muhammad Samiullah's Muslims in Alien Society, is sufficiently explicit about the demographic designs of contemporary Islam. Samiullah rejects family planning as a Western ploy to diminish the numbers of the Muslim population in order to maintain its hegemony. The core of his argument is that birth control has no sanction from the Quran nor from the example and sayings of the Prophet. Since others have claimed just the opposite, a close reading of the source texts of Islam is needed.
Koenraad Elst
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.
Koenraad Elst
His image in the public mind today is almost wholly a result of this selective, this assiduous silence, reinforced now by governmental hagiographic propaganda. The propositions he injected into public discourse were the precise ones-in sequence, and word for word-which Jinnah picked up once he decided that is future lay in playing the communal card. The propositions are again and again picked up by leader. after leader who reckons that the way to national importance is by becoming the leader of one community, and the way to latter is the religion-in-danger shriek; as such leaders keep erupting - Bhindranwale one day, Shahabuddin the next-the reader will at once see the contemporary relevance of Sir Syed's propositions.
Syed Ahmed Khan
I don't remember when I saw the testing results, but it's really one of everyone's favorite things about [Seinfeld], is how poorly it was received by the network people. [...] My favorite thing in the testing is that the show was considered "contemporary, unusual, humorous, and appealing to young adults: therefore, not something that we would want". (laughs)
Jerry Seinfeld
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is "historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the "stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.
Joyce Carol Oates
It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity.
Camille Paglia
Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women. So, it goes, all men (especially black men) must pull together (as in the Clarence Thomas hearings) to support and reaffirm patriarchal domination. Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth.
Bell hooks
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem-just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc. Poets have used such indicators long before modernism-Dickinson's dashes and capitals are one example. Contemporary composers have also expanded on classical notation with new, self-invented markings. You want to find a way that is not random or chaotic but allows for various renderings of a line, a punctuation of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare's Othello - painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its overtones of a clash of cultures, of the partial acceptance of and consequent effect upon one of a minority group. Against this background, the jealousy of the protagonist becomes more credible, the blows to his pride more understandable, the final collapse of his personal, individual world more inevitable. But beyond the personal tragedy, the terrible agony of Othello, the irretrievability of his world, the complete destruction of all his trusted and sacred values - all these suggest the shattering of a universe.
Paul Robeson
Interpenetration is an important teaching, but it still suggests that things outside of one another penetrate into each other. Interbeing is a step forward. We are already inside, so we don't have to enter. In contemporary nuclear physics, people talk about implicit order and explicit order. In the explicit order, things exist outside of each other - the table outside of the flower, the sunshine outside of the cypress tree. In the implicit order, we see that they are inside each other - the sunshine inside the cypress tree. Interbeing is the implicit order. To practice mindfulness and to look deeply into the nature of things is to discover the true nature of interbeing. There we find peace and develop the strength to be in touch with everything. With this understanding, we can easily sustain the work of loving and caring for the Earth and for each other for a long time.
Nhat Hanh
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. Don't be afraid of being out of tune with your environment, and above all pray God that you are not afraid to live, to live hard and fast. To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. You'll have more fun, you'll do more and you'll get more, you'll give more satisfaction the more you know, the more you have worked, and the more you have lived. For yours is a great adventure at a stirring time in the annals of men.
Adlai Stevenson II
That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education-the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern-as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience.
Tony Judt
Roy Jenkins was both radical and contemporary; and this made him the most influential exponent of the progressive creed in politics in postwar Britain. Moreover, the political creed for which he stood belongs as much to the future as to the past. For Jenkins was the prime mover in the creation of a form of social democracy which, being internationalist, is peculiarly suited to the age of globalisation and, being liberal, will prove to have more staying power than the statism of Lionel Jospin or the corporatist socialism of Gerhard Schröder.
Roy Jenkins
...Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine's Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded on his stren gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic "on the Nature of Things", follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise. Almost contemporary with Caesar and Pompey, he lived in the midst of turmoil and alarms; his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquility and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there no hell, except here, and there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.
Will Durant
