Modern Britain Quotes

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. ~ Mark Steyn

As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy. ~ Frederick Forsyth

We will reflect the country we aspire to govern, and the sound of modern Britain is a complex harmony, not a male voice choir. ~ David Cameron

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for fourteen-year-olds now to establish friendships with twenty-six-year-olds - because they know by the age of fourteen all they are ever going to know. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

Every Conservative desires peace. The threat to peace comes from Communism which has powerful forces ready to attack anywhere. Communism waits for weakness, it leaves strength alone. Britain must therefore be strong, strong in her arms, strong in her faith, strong in her own way of life. ~ Margaret Thatcher

HAZEL: "THERE," she said.The official building on their left had a single word etched on the glass doors: AMAZON.
"oh," Frank said."Uh, no, Hazel. That's a modern thing. They're a company, Right? they sell stuff on the internet. They're not actually Amazons."
"Unless ... " Percy walked through the doors. ~ Rick Riordan

Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our attitudes toward human relationships are those of supermarket shoppers: we want what is cheap and quick and easy; we want variety; and we want novelty. But friendship requires a whole other set of mind. ~ Stuart Miller

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires.
Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of th ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state. ~ Jill Lepore

Well, you know ... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop. ~ Tim Curry

One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Modern life would not be possible if it were not for chemicals, nor would modern natural gas production. ~ Aubrey McClendon

Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. ~ Christian Wiman

...age-old evil, tireless and vigilant, cloaked from the masses by modern skepticism, yet still a potent force stalking the dark ways of the night. ~ Dennis Wheatley

Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is ... emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didn't really understand what was going to happen, ~ Ruth Ahmed

When I was in my early twenties, I hoped one day to own a Victoria Cross, the ultimate decoration in Britain and the Commonwealth for bravery in the face of the enemy. ~ Michael Ashcroft

There's an interesting mix to 'Robin Hood' because it's kind of modern but medieval. There is a blend of adventure with a very modern feel. ~ Joanne Froggatt

We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology. ~ Gregory Bateson

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation. ~ Robert Vaughan

The result of the scientific work we have been considering was that the outlook of educated men was completely transformed. At the beginning of the century, Sir Thomas Browne took part in trials for witchcraft; at the end, such a thing would have been impossible. In Shakespeare's time, comets were still portents; after the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, it was known that he and Halley had calculated the orbits of certain comets, and that they were as obedient as the planets to the law of gravitation. The reign of law had established its hold on men's imaginations, making such things as magic and sorcery incredible. In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was still largely medieval. ~ Bertrand Russell

Samhain had its origins, like many modern holidays or celebrations, in pagan times. As the sidhe-seers had been inclined to erect churches and
abbeys on their sacred sites, the Vatican had been wont to "Christianize" ancient, pagan celebrations in an if-you-can't-beat-them-and-don't-wantto-
join-them-rename-it-and-pretend-it-was-yours-all-along campaign. ~ Karen Marie Moning

When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism. ~ Martin Filler

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill.
("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes") ~ Thomas Ligotti

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.) ~ Ben Macintyre

Death flies because it is the modern way of things but doesn't particularly enjoy it, except for occasionally, when he rides up front with the pilot. ~ Claire North

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II. ~ Barry Commoner

Modern families are complicated things. Siblings, half siblings, stepparents, stepcousins, what have you. You can't pick who you're born to, that's for sure. ~ Cherie Priest

A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars. ~ Alan S. Kesselheim

Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments. ~ Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. ~ David Graeber

I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I am fortunate to stay at lots of lovely hotels when I'm on tour, but my favourite hotel group in Britain is Malmaison. I recently stayed at the Malmaison in Manchester, which was pretty amazing. It had a fabulous bar and restaurants, as well as fantastic rooms with mood lighting. ~ Olly Murs

Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe's most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate. ~ Edward Abbey

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats. ~ Walter Lippmann