Anachronistic Quotes & Sayings

We need to get rid of the debt ceiling law. It's anachronistic and it's a problem. — Mark Zandi

Yes, agriculture subsidies are far too generous. They need to be reined in because they cater to special interests while distorting free market competition. Yes, the farm laws are an anachronistic mess. — Juan Williams

Anachronism becomes a problem only in questions of historical meaning, and even then anachronistic analogies can still have heuristic value. — John J. Collins

She merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell. — Milan Kundera

Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people. — Noreena Hertz

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving. — Garth Stein

You know what you need?" Giguhl said. I raised a brow, bracing myself for a punch line. "A to-do list. Might help you keep track of all the beings who want you dead and the satanic birdlife you've kidnapped."
I imagined a list in my head:
1. Perform voodoo ritual on evil owl.
2. Find out who sold us out to the anachronistic Caste vampires.
3. Make amends with a lesbian werewolf.
4. Rescue twin.
5. Murder grandmother.
I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. "Yeah, I'll get right on that."
Gighul heard the sarcasm. "Suit yourself, but don't come crying to me if you forget who you're supposed to kill when. — Jaye Wells

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. — Erich Fromm

External explanations of black-white differences - discrimination or poverty, for example - seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.
In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag - and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily. — Thomas Sowell

The FBI continues to be a broken, anachronistic organization, but state and local law enforcement officials are much more attuned to the kind of threat we're facing. I think that's very hopeful, but it's a long-term process. — Michael Scheuer

Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on, that which disagrees with our memories
a new building here, a change in paint there
is forever jarring and anachronistic. — Daniel D. Victor

The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Maybe there's a universe out there - happening now - where we end up together and when I close my eyes at night, I'm not dreaming the way a normal person would. Instead I'm seeing flashes of our lives in the multiverse. They're not simple dreams because I miss you, right? They're scientific, anachronistic visions. — Gaby Dunn

Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. — Ryszard Legutko

I find my earliest memories covering the anachronistic features of a previous incarnation. Clear recollections came to me of a distant life, a yogi amidst the Himalayan snows. These glimpses of the past, by some dimensionless link, also afforded me a glimpse of the future. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Dark, was banned by the Irish state censor for obscenity. The story was set, as so much of McGahern's later fiction would be, in isolated rural Ireland and dealt with the bleak consequences of parental and clerical child abuse. On the instructions of the Archbishop of Dublin, McGahern was sacked from his job as a primary school teacher. He later left the country. Despite these apparent setbacks, McGahern's literary friends reassured him that all this was a wonderful opportunity in terms of publicity and sales. Remember Joyce and Beckett being forced overseas? This was Irish literary history repeating itself, and preparations were soon being made to mount a campaign against the anachronistic and widely derided censorship laws with McGahern as the figurehead.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more

McGahern agreed that the situation was indeed absurd, and says that even as an adolescent reader he had nothing but contempt for the censorship board. — John McGahern

I have to agree with Artforum publisher Charles Guarino: "It's the place where I found the most kindred spirits - enough oddball, overeducated, anachronistic, anarchic people to make me happy." Finally, — Sarah Thornton

Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies. — Stacey D'Erasmo

Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right. — Laura Lippman

... but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin. — Gregory Maguire

For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life. — Phyllis Chesler

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us. — Frederick C. Beiser

Today, the world is so small and so interdependent that the concept of war has become anachronistic, an outmoded approach. As a rule, we always talk about reform and changes. Among the old traditions, there are many aspects that are either ill-suited to our present reality or are counterproductive due to their shortsightedness. These, we have consigned to the dustbin of history. War too should be relegated to the dustbin of history. — Dalai Lama

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't! ... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying! — Arthur Miller

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg. — Arthur C. Clarke

Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised. — Ruth Ahmed

No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism. — Stephen Jay Gould

Word for word, Galland's version [of the One Thousand and One Nights] is the worst written, the most fraudulent and the weakest, but it was the most widely read. Readers who grew intimate with it experienced happiness and amazement. Its orientalism, which we now find tame, dazzled the sort of person who inhaled snuff and plotted tragedies in five acts. Twelve exquisite volumes appeared from 1707 to 1717, twelve volumes innumerably read, which passed into many languages, including Hindustani and Arabic. We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland. — Jorge Luis Borges

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Mine is a so-called vintage existence, anachronistic living, made all the more rewarding by keeping a raised eyebrow on the absurdities of modern life. — Fennel Hudson

Capping this is the conception of the noble man, now no longer just a remnant nobleman who relies on birth and polite breeding to perpetuate an anachronistic social order, but a person whose largeness of soul triumphs over his ignominious lot and whose depth of practical wisdom enables him to become a teacher of men. — Wm Theodore De Bary

African nationalism is meaningless, dangerous, anachronistic, if it is not, at the same time, pan-Africanism. — Julius Nyerere

Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting. — Sorin Suciu

I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. — Ben Lerner

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country. — Lev Grossman

Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. - — Dani Shapiro

Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The current Baptist view that God condemns "homosexual behavior" and same-sex marriages comes from the same kind of broad and anachronistic scriptural readings as prior support for segregation. — Anonymous

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future. — F Scott Fitzgerald

From a distance, at a time of urbanization and connectivity, rodeo and ranching may seem anachronistic notions - quaint and sepia-toned from an America that no longer exists. — John Branch

Yeah, on the records, the guitars are made melodic, and I try to make it memorable. There's not much just wanking, to be honest - it's mostly melodic parts. I try not to play too many notes. It's just more instrumental music. It's a totally valid criticism if you don't like that kind of thing. It also is maybe a little anachronistic or unnecessary in a certain way. — Stephen Malkmus

One area of the Book of Mormon that does bother some is what they see as anachronistic doctrine; that the Book of Mormon has Christian doctrine prior to the coming of Christ; that it has seemingly New Testament doctrines appearing centuries before Jesus arrives, and it seems to be representing a form of Christianity existing in the New World where there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that archaeologically. Christianity is invisible in the New World prior to the coming of Columbus, and so those things seem like clear anachronisms to people looking at it in that way. — Daniel C. Peterson

Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done - question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture - it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The unfair composition of the Security Council is largely acknowledged. The principal defects are the anachronistic privileges of the five permanent members of the Council and the Council's insufficient representativeness. — Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

It is necessary to have "watchers" at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere "ideas." These are MEASURES ... . Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their "truths" and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins. — Julius Evola

The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet. — Murray Gell-Mann

We were very ... anachronistic. The love that dared not speak its name. — Martha Moody

The Andy Griffith Show was anachronistic. The denizens of Mayberry wore clothing of uncertain vintage and hair of indeterminate style and drove cars of unspecified age. Scant mention was made of current affairs or changing times. Telephone calls were placed through a human operator, and no one seemed to own a television set. — Daniel De Vise

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition. — Frederick C. Beiser

That there could be death camps and a siege and civilians slaughtered by the thousands and thrown into mass graves on European soil fifty years after the end of the Second World War gave the war in Bosnia and the Serb campaign of killing in Kosovo their special, anachronistic interest. But one of the main ways of understanding the war crimes committed in southeastern Europe in the 1990s has been to say that the Balkans, after all, were never really part of Europe. — Susan Sontag

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; — Arthur C. Clarke

Jewish Christmas' - that's what my gentile friends called Chanukah when I was growing up in Michigan in the thirties and forties. Anachronistic, yes, but they had a point. Observing the dietary laws of separating milk and meat dishes was far easier for the handful of Jewish families in our little town than getting through December without mixing the two holidays. — Faye Moskowitz