Popular Modern Day Quotes & Sayings

In a way, Darius brings the vampire back to a more classical interpretation. A modern day Dracula who is charming, sensual, and completely monstrous. There is no pretense of humanity with him. He considers himself a member of a species that is the true apex predator of the world, feeding on humans and using them as puppets for their own bizarre games. He's not struggling with any inner angst. Most humans are either food, entertainment, or useful tools to him. Sometimes all three. He finds the modern popular interpretation of vampires both amusing and useful for his own agenda. — Julie Ann Dawson

My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom. — Franz Boas

It's so hard to actually get the money to make your movie. When you actually have the chance to do it, you have to be absolutely ruthless in order to make the best movie you can make. — Jamie Babbit

You have the freedom, ability and authority to love your life. Just be you, then wait. — Gangaji

The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors. — Karl Kraus

The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. — Peter De Vries

May you experience the truth that he, Christ, looks upon you with love. — Pope John Paul II

Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. "The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficulty," said a memorandum in Cunard's files on the naming of the ship. "They lived generally upon plunder and were rude and unpolished in their manners." In popular usage, the name was foreshortened to "Lucy. — Erik Larson

New things had to be made out of fragments. — Kurt Schwitters

One of the popular fallacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been introduced called credit and that, before this device was known, all purchases were paid for in cash, in other words in coins. A careful investigation shows that the precise reverse is true. In olden days coins played a far smaller part in commerce than they do to-day. Indeed so small was the quantity of coins, that they did not even suffice for the needs of the [Medieval English] Royal household and estates which regularly used tokens of various kinds for the purpose of making small payments. So unimportant indeed was the coinage that sometimes Kings did not hesitate to call it all in for re-minting and re-issue and still commerce went on just the same. — David Graeber

The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality — Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm still heard on 1,500 radio stations across North America every day, about 220 million people a day in 150 countries. — James Dobson

The message of [Fahernheit 9/11] is very weak and propagandistic ... We were used to such messages in the communist days. Everybody has open eyes and can understand that this is propaganda. It was a weak film that tells us nothing new. — Vaclav Klaus

If I was to model after someone's career, I would want to model after Justin Timberlake's career. — Keaton Stromberg

A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think. — Edith Hamilton

Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us. — Leslie Weisman

I went around the corner to motion pictures. — Jerry Reed

Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.

The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends. — Christine Kenneally

ZANY, n. A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with ludicrous incompetence the _buffone_, or clown, and was therefore the ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters of the play. The zany was progenitor to the specialist in humor, as we to-day have the unhappiness to know him. In the zany we see an example of creation; in the humorist, of transmission. Another excellent specimen of the modern zany is the curate, who apes the rector, who apes the bishop, who apes the archbishop, who apes the devil. — Ambrose Bierce

I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I'm not a natural musician. — Nicholson Baker