Quotes About Contemporary

Die größte Sorge des zeitgenössischen Intellektuellen ist die, man könne ihn für altmodisch und gestrig halten. Das dürfte auch der Grund sein, warum die moderne Kunst inzwischen quasi unkritisierbar ist.

In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.

Yksikään sivilisaatio tai aikakausi ei ole pystynyt kehittämään yksilöissään yhtä paljon katkeruutta. Siitä näkökulmasta katsottuna me elämme ennenkokematonta aikaa. Jos nykyajan henkinen tila on esitettävä yhdellä sanalla, se on epäilemättä katkeruus.

Ninguna civilización, ninguna época han sido capaces de desarrollar en los hombres tal cantidad de amargura. Desde este punto de vista, vivimos tiempos sin precedentes. Si hubiera que resumir el estado mental contemporáneo en una palabra yo elegiría, sin dudarlo, amargura.

For the most part, contemporary sorjuanistas downplay the role of religious faith and vocation in her life. This understanding of Sor Juana is flawed, I contend, for it is based on a very narrow definition of religious vocation. Too often, the diminishment of Sor Juana's vocation leads to downplaying the significance of Sor Juana's theological and philosophical writing.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.

My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.

Men often swear to kill themselves, and yet Few of them, nowadays, make good their threat

All-out nuclear war, of course, is just a literary device here; it is not a prerequisite for contemporary cultural disintegration, and indeed, one could argue that corporate consumer culture is tantamount to a kind of nuclear attack on the mind.

Contemporary thinking in contemporary art, an associative collage of banality, turns into an empty formality, expressed in an ugly imagination, where people try to surpass their own selves in a vicious imagination.

The much-discussed contemporary phenomenon of cultural and theological relativism is itself in this sense simply the dark side of positivism.

The shallow social and political alternatives bequeathed to contemporary western society by the Enlightenment and its aftermath, in which every issue stands either to left or to the right on some hypothetical spectrum, and every political question can be answered in terms of 'for' or 'against' – this trivialized world of thought cannot cope with the complexities of real life either in the first or the twenty-first century.

For a man like Bar-Avo, everything is a constant present.

He is conscious of the past and present injustices, but he knows that real remedies are to be found in contemporary Christian compassion, and not in compensatory justice.

I said that foundational figures of rock can be accommodated within a Beethovenian model of greatness, and the masculinism of 20th-century rock stars finds its contemporary equivalent in the sometimes overt misogyny of hip hop. I also

the Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old'.

Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader's limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility. (I, 258)

The contemporary anthropologist, under democrats' severe gaze, skips quickly over ethnic differences like over hot coals.

It is not easy to discern whether contemporary journalism is a cynical way to get rich by corrupting man or a "cultural" apostolate carried out by hopelessly uncivilized minds.

The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.

Even the enemy of technology denounces its public, but trivial, outrages more than its invisible, but disastrous, destructions. (As if contemporary man's feverish migration, for instance, were disturbing because of traffic accidents.)

The two most pressing problems of the contemporary world: demographic expansion and genetic deterioration are unsolvable. Liberal principles prevent the solution of the first, egalitarian ones that of the second.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation...