Modern Societies Quotes

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.

I think ageing is challenging, surprising, fun, and full of friendship, so that is the approach I'll take, objecting to the stigmatization of ageing in so many modern societies.

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.

In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.

the more our societies grow, the more important trust becomes and the harder it is to build. And that is a paradox of modern societies.

Homegrown terrorists are a real problem for even the most modern, democratic societies.

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.

There are no modern successful societies that do not deal with the issues raised by Populists and Fabianists but also avoid going to one of these extremes. The modern battle for power in democartic socities is between Populism and Fabianism.

Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modern societies founded on Islam, whose strictest adherents long for a return to the time of Muhammad?

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.