Anachronism Quotes

“What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

“How do you explain plastic to a medieval forest bard?”
― Jefferson Smith, Strange Places

“I'll go get the horse and buggy," you'll say. And I'll say, "But I thought we were taking the hovercraft?”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.”
― Elisabeth Lenk

“Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.

They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense.”
― Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity

“We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.”
― Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

“A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse.”
― Norman Lock, American Meteor

“Secondary-school pupils are demanding more school, more funding, more staff, more security. Nineteenth-century demands. School is finished. All we can do is transform it into a gigantic Web cafe. In their own heads, the school students have already moved over into multimedia and the twenty-first century, as is attested by the incongruity of the demonstrations, including the incongruity of the anachronistic violence of the hooligan element.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000

“Words frozen in religious texts, when not allowed to be interpreted in the current context, lead to irrationality with religious leaders having the exclusive authority of rationalizing it.”
― R. N. Prasher

“I pull out my laptop, which is probably the most advanced piece of technology that has ever crossed the threshold of Lapin's lair, and set it up on a stack of heavy books, all from the Wayback-list. The shiny MacBook looks like a hapless alien trying to blend in with the quiet stalwarts of human civilization I crack it open - glowing alien guts revealed! - and cue the visualization as Lapin crosses the room with two cups in two saucers.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Underlying all these breaches is a single systemic security flaw, exactly 3.375 inches long. Credit card magstripes are a technological anachronism, a throwback to the age of the eight-track tape, and today the United States is virtually alone in nurturing this security hole.”
― Keith Poulsen

“The Medical Man smoked a cigarette.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine