Top 100 Quotes About Modernity
#1. To be "modern" means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.
Sylvain Tesson
#2. The possibility of a musical modernity that was not characterized by sensationalism
Alain Frogley
#3. Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.
Pranab Mukherjee
#4. while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
John Mark Reynolds
#5. What we witness at the fea is not just a celebration of the multiplicity of modernities but also, and more importantly, a critical commentary on local structures of inequality that take for granted that both tradition and modernity are the prerogatives of the high ranking and wealthy.
Niko Besnier
#6. This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac
Cristiane Serruya
#7. It's a tragedy that modernity has released this Ebola beast into the world. It renders humans untouchable, and that's sickening. The international response so far has been scandalous. China has delivered f**k all.
Bob Geldof
#8. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#9. When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. You and I will never live to see the day that women recover their balance.
Zane Grey
#11. My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now - our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.
Jean Nouvel
#12. High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.
Anthony Giddens
#13. When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer
#14. I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.
Charles Bukowski
#15. You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.
Theodore Bikel
#16. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#18. Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.
Sivananda Saraswati
#19. Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#20. Hitting "like" on a social media platform is the modern day version of clapping at the end of a performance.
J.R. Rim
#21. I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.
Pico Iyer
#22. It is rare in today's turbulent world to find a city that so harmoniously mixes tradition and modernity, without enslaving itself to either one.
Margie Rynn
#23. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
John Fowles
#24. It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.
Paul C. Vitz
#25. Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.
Joseph Roach
#26. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.
Jurgen Habermas
#27. The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.
Amadeo Bordiga
#28. Antiquity and modernity are cut from the same cloth. That is to say, our sense of things being 'ancient' is produced - both historically and in practice - by the sense that we ourselves are 'modern'.
David Wengrow
#29. America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
Jean Baudrillard
#31. I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?
Andrew Sullivan
#32. Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
David Novak
#33. North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#34. A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.
St. Anthony The Great
#35. What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
Henri Lefebvre
#36. [Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.
-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17
Randall Styers
#37. All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.
Ulrich Beck
#38. All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.
Italo Calvino
#39. I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.
Francois Cluzet
#40. There were the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody.
Roberto Bolano
#41. Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#42. When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.
Mark Twain
#43. Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.
I.M. Pei
#44. The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
Octavio Paz
#45. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom
#46. Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.
Irving Howe
#47. No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives - not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its fundamental commitment to freedom, reason, and human dignity.
Rodney Stark
#48. Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#49. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#50. I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.
Liam Gillick
#51. The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Michel Foucault
#52. Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
Paul De Man
#53. The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.
Paul C. Vitz
#54. Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us.
A.J. Orde
#55. The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold
#56. The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Allan Bloom
#57. Nothing is more pathological in our pathological modernity than this disease of Christian pity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#58. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
#59. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire
#60. The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
Antonio Gramsci
#61. Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
Rowan Williams
#62. The '80s was the time for the great so-called modernization in Spain. It was a moment when it seemed that everything was breaking up and moving fast into modernity.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#63. And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
#64. Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. Modernity kills ghostly romance
("The Undying Thing")
Barry Pain
#66. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#68. Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.
Stephen Batchelor
#69. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.
Bill Buford
#70. The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.
Hamid Dabashi
#71. And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.
T. S. Eliot
#72. ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age!
Ted Cruz
#73. and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all
Steven Pinker
#74. Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#75. Saving time is one of the great superpowers you can unlock in the modern era.
J.R. Rim
#76. But, Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me love him - as Christ would, who died for the souls of men. Make me love him splendidly, because he is Thy son.
D.H. Lawrence
#77. That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.
Don DeLillo
#78. It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.
Sverker Sorlin
#79. Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
John Mark Reynolds
#81. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.
Bram Stoker
#82. When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business.
Vera Wang
#83. There's a lot of particularly good things going on in my life at the moment. It's the fact that I get to be an ambassador for the concept of modernity. I can be creative and useful. And I don't have to grow up.
Matthew Healy
#84. [X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).
Walead Beshty
#85. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
#86. Their phobia was a fear of America and the West and modernity.
Nick Cohen
#87. The scientific and societal achievements of the modern age are undisputable. But after the French Revolution, modernity increasingly emancipated itself from Christian roots, thereby becoming rootless itself.
Walter Kasper
#88. Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people's inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them.
Guy Mankowski
#89. I really enjoyed 'Casino Royale' because suddenly something changed with this modernity and with Daniel bringing life to James Bond in a very new way.
Berenice Marlohe
#90. You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.
Pascal Bruckner
#91. Christmas ought to be brought up to date," Maria said. "It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols.
John Masefield
#92. The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.
Jean Baudrillard
#94. For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.
George W. S. Trow
#96. A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
G.K. Chesterton
#97. The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#98. Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common
Julian T. Jackson
#99. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. Simple yet succinct, Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals exposes the idols of modernity and provides the biblical arsenal needed for their complete destruction. Trevin Wax provides medicine for the heart in this short, powerful study. Read it and be blessed.
Daniel L. Akin
