Quotes About Modernity

W]e took turns removing each other's underwear and I thanked God for twenty-first century clothing. Until you've attempted to undress a Victorian era noblewoman, you can't possibly understand how wonderful a simple pair of cotton briefs is.

The work of making, maintaining, and analyzing classification systems is richly textured. It is one of the central kinds of work of modernity including science and medicine. It is, we argue, central to social life

If you think modernity is mostly to blame for pollution, visit Africa where people still burn wood and dung as an energy source.

Black-and-white always looks modern, whatever that word means.

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.

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.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

I have never tied my hair in a bun and I rarely wear a bindi.

When I opened my first shop, city gents were still carrying tightly furled umbrellas and wearing bowler hats. It was into this world that I launched my new ideas about fashion.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

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.

Writes Webber: This conflict of style has continued in the twentieth-century debate about traditional versus contemporary worship. Traditional worship seems to be hanging on to modernity while contemporary worship has capitulated to pop culture. In either case the debate continues to rage about style with little concern for a biblical theology of worship. 8

No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.

I don't think you go out of style when you're living in the present most of the time. And I think that is what I do.

Those sort of rules are all gone by now," said Mr. Arabin. "Everything has gone by, I believe," said Tom Staple. "The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.

It's not the way it used to be... people ain't the way they used to be.

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?

I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?

Être moderne, c'est bricoler dans l'incurable.

Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance.

Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

A Winston le sorprendía que lo más característico de la vida moderna no fuera su crueldad ni su inseguridad, sino sencillamente su vaciedad, su absoluta falta de contenido. La vida no se parecía, no sólo a las mentiras lanzadas por las telepantallas, sino ni siquiera a los ideales que el Partido trataba de lograr.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.