Top 100 Quotes About Modernity
#1. Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.
Pranab Mukherjee
#2. Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.
Pankaj Mishra
#3. I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery.
Huston Smith
#4. Originality' is the sickness of modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In doing so, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death
Carlos Fuentes
#5. Modernity could be identified with the gradual disappearance of ritual, of those kind of communal bonds founded upon a symbolically shared sense of guilt.
Thomas Brockelman
#6. Another example may be the robust revival today of traditional or pre-revolutionary beliefs, rituals, customs, ceremonies, and even superstitions, most of which were once strenuously denounced and suppressed during the nation's drive for a cosmopolitan modernity.
Xiaobing Tang
#7. I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
Peter L. Berger
#8. I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.
Sara Sheridan
#9. You can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.
G. Willow Wilson
#10. Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
Octavio Paz
#11. The economic crisis, so conveniently operated and driven by the markets, by financial groups, by the needs of a globalized economy, faces the task of restoring social control, which the crisis of modernity lost sight of.
Zygmunt Bauman
#12. The critics of modernity were warning that one must be vigilant against the demands of hyperorganized commercial society and consumerism lest they undermine one's true humanity.
George M. Marsden
#13. We are called to see that the Church does not adapt its thinking to the horizons that modernity prescribes for it but rather that it brings to those horizons the powerful antidote of God's truth. It is not the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being demythologised.
David F. Wells
#14. As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing - as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law.
Gary Bauer
#15. The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
Antonio Gramsci
#16. If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.
Bruno Latour
#17. It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is ... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for ...
Tony Kushner
#19. The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
Octavio Paz
#20. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
Salman Rushdie
#21. The Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn't fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don't deal with it as Christians.
Erwin McManus
#22. I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover.
Nell Zink
#23. The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.
Bruno Latour
#24. In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West - which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else.
Rabih Alameddine
#25. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
Oriana Fallaci
#26. The liquid state of modernity is corrosive to continuity.
Samuel Wilson
#27. The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.
Sam Harris
#28. Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.
Robert Bork
#30. Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.
Graham Harvey
#31. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Charles Baudelaire
#32. How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.
Pankaj Mishra
#34. There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality . All else is immorality.
Theodore Roosevelt
#35. When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.
Alexander Kluge
#36. The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!
Ken Wilber
#37. The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#39. We are returning to the archaic, that is, the eternal condition of mankind, which the brief parenthesis of 'modernity' made us forget, in other words, the rivalry of peoples, of ethnic and cultural blocs and of civilisations.
Guillaume Faye
#41. Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#42. When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson.
Yuval Noah Harari
#43. Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.
Gianni Vattimo
#44. Entrepreneurs are favored in neoliberal contexts because they prize ingenuity, self-invention, adaptation, dispensing with establishment hierarchies, and self-mastery. Church planting can be read as a religious incarnation of late modernity's entrepreneurial disposition.
James S Bielo
#45. What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. Even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more - some "fullness" that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we've constructed in modernity.
James K.A. Smith
#47. It would seem this is the gift modernity has bestowed upon our generation: the practice of "dating," an awkward procedure where a man and a woman find themselves talking rot to each other in a darkened room. If it were up to me, I would say modernity can keep it, as I want no part.
Suzanne Rindell
#48. America's vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It's the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.
Oriana Fallaci
#49. If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher
Cameron Adams
#50. Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?
Terry Tempest Williams
#51. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere "modernity" cannot kill. Later:
Bram Stoker
#53. Abortion is without a doubt one of the greatest moral evils within modernity. As the "Advocate of Christian Memory," a pope must take up the mantle of defending the culture of life - a defense the Early Church held against the pagans of Rome.
Pope Francis
#55. Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country.
Emile Lahoud
#56. My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#57. The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.
Thomas C. Oden
#58. And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.
Berenice Marlohe
#59. Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles Baudelaire
#60. Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.
Dan Savage
#61. A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
Steven Pinker
#62. One of those blocks (that prevent the 'Middle East from entering the mainstream of modernity') is the orthodox tenet that the Koran and the scriptures contain all the knowledge required to deal with the problems of contemporary society.
Arnold Beichman
#63. Traditions brings continuity to one's existence, but this sort of continuity is precisely what has been increasingly lost
throughout modernity.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
#64. As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.
Susan Vreeland
#65. Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Theodor Adorno
#66. Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.
Pankaj Mishra
#67. The key imperatives of modernity: freedom of conscience, tolerance of difference, equality of the sexes, and an investment in life before death.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#68. I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.
Kai Bird
#69. Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.
Orhan Pamuk
#70. [ ... ] to be absolutely modern means: never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation.
Milan Kundera
#71. Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
James K.A. Smith
#72. Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#73. Modernity is a busy place, spinning with silicon speed that goes ever faster but never forward, people pressed into cities full of loneliness.
Douglas Wilson
#74. Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.
Eric Kandel
#75. I always try to connect with what's happening in the world-reality, modernity, the 21st century, all that - and with Jil it started to feel very disconnected from the outside and how women were looking at fashion, experiencing fashion, interpreting fashion.
Raf Simons
#76. America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.
Ernest Gellner
#77. Alexander McQueen was one of the greatest fashion designers of his generation. His genius, sometimes provocative, admired and saluted by all, constantly opened new perspectives. Visionary and avant-garde, his creations took their inspiration from both tradition and timeless hyper-modernity.
Francois-Henri Pinault
#78. Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#79. This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.
Andrzej Stasiuk
#80. [W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.
John Christy
#81. It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse ...
Irving Kristol
#82. Africa must take the first steps into modernity on its own. There must be a change in mentality. We have to stop perceiving ourselves as beggars.
James Shikwati
#83. The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
Paul De Man
#84. Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.
Nell Zink
#85. There is something about Prince William and Prince Harry that brings real modernity to the British royal family. They are also very open, human, and kind, and this is what I have tried to capture in the pictures I have taken of them as well as in my pictures of Prince William and Catherine.
Mario Testino
#86. He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.
Jocelyn Gibb
#87. Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
Dylan Moran
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.
Irving Howe
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
