Modern Use
William Rees-Mogg, as editor of The Times newspaper, used the "on a wheel" version of the quotation as the heading (set in capital letters) for an editorial on 1 July 1967 about the "Redlands" court case, which had resulted in prison sentences for Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.
The philosopher Mary Midgley used a variation on the phrase in an article in the journal Philosophy written to counter a review praising The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where she cuttingly said that she had "not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel."
Variations of the phrase also appear in pop music. The Mission recorded a track titled "Butterfly on a Wheel" for their album Carved in Sand changing the quote slightly to "Love breaks the wings of a butterfly on a wheel." The hard rock song "Soul Asylum" from The Cult's Sonic Temple album opens with the line "Who would break a butterfly on a wheel?". Coldplay rephrased the quote as "The wheel breaks the butterfly" in their 2011 single "Paradise." Oasis also made a reference to the line with 'Catch the wheel that breaks the butterfly', in their song Falling Down.
A film titled Butterfly on a Wheel was released in 2007. In the U.S.A. the title of the movie was changed to Shattered.
Read more about this topic: Who Breaks A Butterfly Upon A Wheel?
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)