Quotes About Modernity

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.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity.

something else created modernity, the world that most of us reading this book inhabit. That something was the sudden availability, beginning in the early eighteenth century, of cheap fossil fuel. An exaggeration? One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor

Philosophy suffered more from modernity than any other field of human endeavor.

Our epoch does not love itself.

Ben lungi dall'essere fluida, la modernità è l'epoca in cui le parole sono pietre, e in cui si attua l'incubo del verba manent .

In concreto, il mondo colorato, rumoroso e soprattutto fasullo che ci sta intorno, è l'erede del sogno romantico di una rinascita del mito, del fatto che la ragione deve essere sostituita dal sogno. Piuttosto che razionalista, come spesso la si dipinge, la modernità, almeno dal romanticismo in avanti, è stata in buona parte mitologica e anti-illuminista, e l'esito del postmoderno si pone, in piena coerenza, in questa linea di sviluppo.

Benjamin does attempt to decode their subjective experience, but he does this within social and historical limits, insisting that subjects inhabiting capitalist modernity, exposed to the workings of commodity fetishism, have become objects, objectified, susceptible to processes of commodification (of their labour-power, of the culture they consume).

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.

O objetivo dos retratos das famílias burguesas nos séculos XVIII e XIX era confirmar uma imagem ideal do modelo (proclamando o seu estatuto social e embelezando a sua aparência); em função deste propósito, é fácil compreender porque é que as pessoas não sentiam necessidade de ter mais do que um retrato. O que o registo fotográfico confirma é, mais modestamente, que a pessoa existe; por isso eles nunca são demais.

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority.

The fashion industry, like others, is constantly changing.

But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after.

Treating 'life' as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity's cult of perpetual activity.

Het moet trouwens toch maar eens afgelopen zijn met de 'moderniteit' in dit jaar - dat is zo'n rekbaar begrip, door tijdgenoten en latere generaties telkens anders geïnterpreteerd en door iedere generatie steeds weer in een ander tijdsgewricht geplaatst, dat het eigenlijk helemaal niet geschikt is om de ontzaglijke niet-gelijktijdige gelijktijdigheid die het jaar 1913 vooral kenmerkt naar behoren te schetsen.

Either way, modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.

Keep an eye out for other things that we moderns might be trying to rid ourselves of without sufficiently understanding their function—not only Chesterton's organs, but his gods and his breast milk, his cuisine and his play.

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.

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.

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.

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.

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.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.