Quotes About Moderns

Why must people always assume we moderns knew more than any of the previous cultures? It simply isn't true, evidence proves otherwise.

Men were not as yet possessed of that distrust of language which animates us moderns and frequently causes us to see in words a far from adequate expression of the facts. On the contrary, there was a simple and unsuspecting faith that the range of an idea and the range of the word roughly corresponding to it must in every case exactly coincide.18

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that "necessity really is the mother of invention.

To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia's day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.

The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.

Bacon, like Vico, held that the ancients were not classic models for the moderns, but their primitive ancestors – an idea that lies at the core of the New Science.

It is a matter worthy of observation, that the more a country is peopled, the smaller their armies are. In military numbers, the ancients far exceeded the moderns: and the reason is evident, for trade being the consequence of population, men become too much absorbed thereby to attend to any thing else. Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defence. And history sufficiently informs us, that the bravest achievements were always accomplished in the non age of a nation.

The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.

The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks--pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.

William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod, Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell: 'The nakedness of woman is the work of God', Or that title--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The private lives of the ancients are now the public sport of the moderns.

The moderns say that they are leaving the past, because it is exhausted; but they lie. They are escaping from the past because it is so strong.

The success of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings helped restore the reputation of these discredited genres, thus enabling moderns to draw on their innocent wisdom.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.