Top 414 Contemporary Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Contemporary Quotes from famous people such as Sushma Swaraj, Tom Sturridge, Marc Jacobs, David Chang, Olga Tokarczuk, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Knowledge in Sanskrit will go a long way in finding sol

Knowledge in Sanskrit will go a long way in finding solutions to the contemporary problems like global warming, unsustainable consumption, civilisational clash, poverty, terrorism, etc.
Sushma Swaraj
Basically, I was a very serious film fan. I watched a lot of cinema and contemporary and European film.
Tom Sturridge
There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn’t realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.
Marc Jacobs
Contemporary ramen is totally different than what most Americans think ramen should be. Ramen is not one thing; there are many, many different types.
David Chang
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
Olga Tokarczuk
Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them.
Brian Ferneyhough
There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.
Tariq Ali
Opposition to social change is but one pillar of contemporary Republicanism.
Richard Cohen
I listen to both oldies and contemporary stations. I enjoy listening to current stuff because there’s an energy to it that’s inspiring.
Carole King
It’s a great challenge to me, playing someone who is supposed to be absolutely normal and not remarkable and contemporary and yet at the same time does have a lot of fantastic power. As an actor it’s a great challenge to bring reality to that.
Nicholas Hammond
Gucci has always represented great design and contemporary lifestyle.
Marco Bizzarri
In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
I never have that ‘we were robbed’ feeling when looking around now at where some of our contemporaries are.
Robert Forster
A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
Robert Musil
I wanted to give people – which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really – I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet – in a very pure form.
Graeme Murphy
The Zombies were really unique – they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
Paul Weller
I’ve been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
Ken Liu
In many ways, Tucker Carlson’s a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.
Alex Pareene
Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.
Jeffrey Deitch
London can be a platform to look at what living in contemporary Britain is all about.
Munira Mirza
In hunting ideas for books, I look for stories about long-past events that once commanded the world’s attention but that, for one reason or another, faded from contemporary awareness.
Erik Larson
It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.
Steve Martin
Mimi Fox is one of the most exciting contemporary jazz guitarists I’ve heard.
Paul Gilbert
The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.
Neil MacGregor
There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.
Dasha Zhukova
All of my contemporaries in L.A. are all graduates of either Yale, Julliard, Trinity. The best of the bunch come from that.
Tony Todd
I’m a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
Shea Hembrey
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist I learned about pretty early on. She’s one of the first contemporary artists I knew about and was really drawn to.
Martine Syms
I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It’s so impressive what they do with their bodies. It’s like painting: an abstraction.
Michael Leunig
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
Marilynne Robinson
I’ve been lucky to ride 10 different horses at the Olympics. I’d like to think that of all of them, Big Ben – who was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame – would still be competitive in the contemporary sport.
Ian Millar
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civil

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
Simone Weil
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they’re just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they’ve had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
Chris Claremont
I love black-and-white movies that are about contemporary subjects.
Noah Baumbach
I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.
Mary E. Pearson
I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire – performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.
Pierre Boulez
I’ve become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital – no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We’ve come into our own, finally.
Eli Broad
I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they’re highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.
David Means
Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands… Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.
Giorgio Agamben
I’ve realised that if it is to remain relevant, contemporary music needs to change.
Ryuichi Sakamoto
One of the challenges with period costumes is, on a technical level, making the scale of different periods work on contemporary bodies. We’re much bigger than what people were in older times.
Colleen Atwood
I learned piano off YouTube and still do a lot. It’s hard to find contemporary indie music on there, at least lessons, because the reach is smaller. I did it so people like me out there could learn my songs if they wanted to and maybe, in a small way, to pay forward all the free lessons I’ve had over the years.
Tobias Jesso, Jr.
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
Christopher Lasch
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don’t think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
Leonard Baskin
Post-minimalism implies music that’s genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.
Maya Beiser
I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.
Chang-Rae Lee
I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.
Luca Guadagnino
In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father – of men as men, in other words.
Dennis Prager
There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, ‘Degenerate Art,’ which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called ‘sick’ and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.
Hans Haacke
Thank God sci-fi has moved away from spaceships fighting aliens! Now it’s a place where you can explore contemporary issues or emotional feelings. You can put it all in a different setting.
Morten Tyldum
Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.
Amiri Baraka