Quotes about current
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“A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Life, Dreams, Future

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Imagination, Understanding, Knowledge

“The systemic transformation of the current world is a strategic challenge for our people. We must be ready to accept them.”

Nursultan Nazarbayev (1940) first president of Kazakhstan

"Speech at the international scientific and practical conference "30 years of leadership" https://elbasy.kz/en/speeches/2019-06/speech-elbasy-na-nazarbayev-international-scientific-and-practical-conference-30 (2019)

People, World

“I have extensive management experience in crisis situations, accumulated experience, and knowledge in the security and defense system. I have experience in overcoming the economic crisis. The current dangers and the accumulated experience and knowledge practically coincide”

Robert Kocharyan (1954) second President of Armenia

Excerpts from 2021 keynote speech on formation of 'Armenia' alliance

Knowledge

“The current situation, although difficult, is not the worst. There is a spirit of solidarity among the people.”

Tomasz Peta (1951) Roman Catholic bishop

Archbishop Peta: Solidarity in Kazakhstan in times of pandemic https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2020-04/kazakhstan-church-solidarity-amid-trying-times.html (15 April 2020)

People

“For those who wish to transgress to another gender, they are truly the destroyers of this beautiful environment we are currently living in.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Beauty

“Gymnasiums have become the holy houses for the young and old people alike in the current world. Six-packs is their “promised land”.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

People, World, Housing

“Hold fast to your Creator and seek His guidance in understanding the world in which you are currently living in.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

World, Understanding

“The advice of our parents will vary according to the country we are currently living in and the dominant political ideologies (politideos) of that environment.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Parent, Country

“Although Poole sometimes missed the cops-and-robbers dramas he had often enjoyed in his youth, he had grown to accept the current wisdom: excessive interest in pathological behaviour was itself pathological.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), p. 73

Wisdom, Youth

“I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.””

Maureen Corrigan (1955) American journalist and writer

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 70)
Context: Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.

Life, Literature

“A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 1, “God Save the King” (p. 37)

“I hope that from crisis and tragedy comes engagement. Don’t just complain about [an issue], do something about it! Don’t just lament about the current state of affairs, vote!”

Michael McFaul (1963) American academic and diplomat

"An Interview with former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul" in LA Times High School Insider https://highschool.latimes.com/carnegie-mellon-university/an-interview-with-former-u-s-ambassador-to-russia-michael-mcfaul/ (30 August 2019)

Hope

“Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple−pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 1, "The Website of Dreadful Night"

Money, World, Cars

“While we are currently confronted with the unprecedented difficulties caused by the spread of the coronavirus disease. . . I sincerely hope that we all work together hand in hand to overcome this difficult situation and continue to seek happiness of the people and world peace.”

Naruhito (1960) Emperor of Japan since 2019

Source: "Emperor Naruhito Makes Reference to Pandemic in First Speech in Half-Year" in Nippon https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00612/ (1 October 2020)

Happiness, People, World, Disease

“These heretics have been so obstonent that no policy has worked or sufficed to get them to recognise their errors… I can see that if there were a way of forcing them we could justly move against them, but that is not the case now, nor do I currently have the means, because I am tired, alone and without help and there are so many of them that great force would be needed to overcome them. The true remedy is to convene a general council.”

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558) Holy Roman Emperor

Way, Error, Help

“[W]e may... find more common ground than we currently imagine.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990), Approaching Abortion Anew

Imagination

“I arrived in France, and found myself up against the legend which was current in left-wing Parisian salons: the Jews had always lived in perfect harmony with the Arabs. I was almost congratulated for having been born in such a land where racial discrimination and xenophobia were unknown. It made me laugh.”

Albert Memmi (1920) French writer

Source: "Who is an Arab Jew?" (1975)

Perfection

“The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Source: The Great Delusion https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/21/chris-hedges-the-great-delusion/. Scheerpost, December 21, 2020

War, Hope, History, Suicide

“Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.”

John Brunner book The Jagged Orbit

Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 46, “Why’s, After the Event” (p. 143)

Men, Guy, Sense

“[T]he great genie, the granter of wishes—God, in a microcosm—is archetypally trapped in the tiny confines of a lamp and subject, as well, to the will of the lamp’s current holder. Genie—genius—is the combination of possibility and potential, and extreme constraint.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), pp. 35–36

God

“I'd rather go to prison for the third time rather than let the current government [of Yulia Tymoshenko] assume power. It would cost the country less for one person to suffer than for the whole country to suffer.”

Viktor Yanukovych (1950) Ukrainian politician who was the President of Ukraine

2009
Source: [2020-10-27, Янукович пожалел, что в третий раз не сел в тюрьму - Украина - TCH.ua, https://tsn.ua/ru/ukrayina/yanukovich-pozhalel-chto-v-tretii-raz-ne-sel-v-tyurmu.html, https://web.archive.org/web/20201027065326/https://tsn.ua/ru/ukrayina/yanukovich-pozhalel-chto-v-tretii-raz-ne-sel-v-tyurmu.html, 2020-10-27, 2022-06-12, web.archive.org]

Suffering, Time, Personality, Country

“Ukraine is a very difficult country, very difficult for us. In its current state it is hostile towards us.”

Dmitry Peskov (1967) Russian politician

"Kremlin says peace talks should continue, lashes 'hostile' Ukraine" https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-talks-with-ukraine-not-easy-important-that-they-continue-ria-2022-04-02/, Reuters, 2 April 2022 <br class="br">CNN Interview (March 2022)

Hostility, Country