Quotes About Modernization

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.

We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people—and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what? Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labor, we can now fill these hours with . . . ?

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.

As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly.

We cannot fight new wars with old weapons.

It's unfortunate when people say you can't wear skirts or do item numbers, or a girl can't dress in a certain way. Are we going back to dark ages?

Once-in-a-generation weather events are now becoming a regular occurrence. Whether it be public safety power shutoffs or electric system failures due to extreme weather events, we must invest in grid resilience and modernization in order to keep the power on in impacted communities.

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

It is not only just a Indian phenomenon but it's happening the world over. People are taking old movies and remaking them; old serials are being made into web series. There is no harm in remixing the song if you do it well.

Organizations spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and implementing huge servers, new Web sites and applications. They have to continue to do that, but they also have to clean up the mess of the '90s.

Client companies and advertising agencies are old-world-order places. The systems and processes and structures come from a time when you shot the TV commercial, then you did the print ads, then you did everything else - including the website. Everything has changed, but the systems haven't.

I remember one of my writers on 'Weeds' got a new apartment and didn't get cable or a dish. He just hooked his computer up to the TV. I was like, 'This is it. This is how it's happening.'

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

Pop music has progressed.

Pageants have consistently evolved over the decades and have tried numerous plays on different portions of the competition.

If I had my way, I wouldn't do annual reviews, if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated.

In comparison with other men of their time, the Americans were distinguished by the possession of new political and social ideas, which were destined to be the foundation of the American commonwealth.

The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors - science, capitalism, consumerism.

During my career I've enjoyed re-invigorating and contextualizing classic characters that are relatable to contemporary audiences.

I'd like to realize services that people naturally think should be available and create a society where they can feel the convenience of digitalization.

The list of things that are conventional today that I use every day that I thought would never make it is a very long list.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.