Twenty First Century Quotes

“In this twenty-first century, reality is virtual and truth is broader.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require?”
― R.F. Georgy, Notes from the Cafe

“It's the twenty-first century. Arriving to find a bunch of old dudes in brown robes would be equally weird.”
― Kendare Blake, Girl of Nightmares

“Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“I don't know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Lara Jean, promise me you won’t let her get her hooks in Daddy. He doesn’t know the first thing about dating in the twenty-first century, and she’ll just eat him alive. He needs to be with someone mature, someone with wisdom in her eyes.” I snort. “Like who? A grandma? If so, I know a few from Belleview I could set him up with.”
― Jenny Han, To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Gone are the days when success depends on how you use your muscle tissues. In this 21st century, your brain cells must work more than your muscle tissues!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Some might question whether there is still any need for an essayist such as Montaigne. Twenty-first century people, in the developed world, are already individualistic to excess, as well as entwined with one another to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of a sixteenth-century winegrower. His sense of the “I” in all things may seem a case of preaching to the converted, or even feeding drugs to the addicted. But Montaigne offers more than an incitement to self-indulgence. The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgement, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever ”gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.” To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature that looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“There are too many Jews on the France Culture radio station,' says Renaud Camus, and he is accused of racism. But the problem lies elsewhere and goes far beyond the Jewish question. It is, more generally, that there is too much of everything everywhere. Too many people, too many places, too many images on television, 'too many notes in Mozart', too many ideas and too many words to express them - too many old people among the old, too many young people among the young. And, ultimately, the worst of it is that there's too much culture on France Culture.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Last century we looked out, this one just in. We went to the moon, for Christ’s sake.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo