Archaic Quotes

My brother is two years older than me and he was brilliant at everything, it seemed. He was captain of the cricket and rugby teams. We had this rather archaic system of head boys and prefects at my school. I was in my fourth year - in Scotland we finish school in our sixth year - and my brother had become head boy and brilliant at everything: academia, sports. In fact, all the things I wasn`t good at. Then he left and I couldn`t get my head round anything, so I became depressed and got in trouble a lot. I remember my mother driving me one night through heavy rain, with the windscreen wipers going. It was the first half term of my fifth year and she said that she`d spoken to my dad and that I could leave school if I wanted to. I`d only assumed that I`d have to stick it out until I was 18, but here I was being offered the chance to leave at 16. My whole world opened up. I couldn`t believe it. And I was out, as soon as she said those words.

I guess if you see both of the movies (Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)) together, they sum up as an antiwar film. Whether it`s about territory or religion, war is horrifyingly and depressingly archaic. But I didn`t set out to make a war movie. I cared about those three fellows - Bradley, Hayes and Gagnon (John H. Bradley, Ira H. Hayes, `René A. Gagnon`) - the headliners on that war-bond circus. The young men were taken off the front lines, wined and dined, introduced to movie stars. But it felt wrong to them.

On signing, at age 18, a long-term contract with Otto Preminger: It was an archaic system. You were, basically, under the control of one man and his whims. He wasn`t easy and it wasn`t an easy time. He wasn`t a nurturing director and I thought, `Maybe I don`t want to be a film actor, after all.`

What`s really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.

For various reasons, education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective enquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.

Galvanised into action by the second trial, I was determined to change Britain`s archaic sex laws.

That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.