Quotes About Modernity

I remember when the palm trees were short and Tomorrowland was modern.

People are really surprised by the fact that I keep in touch with the latest trends rather than retreating to the distant past.

What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.

It was in the mosque that al-Zarqawi first discovered Salafism, a doctrine that in its contemporary form advocates a return to theological purity and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafists deem Western-style democracy and modernity not only fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, but the main pollutants of the Arab civilization

All over the planet, conflicts between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women's bodies.

To be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one's grave diggers.

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.

If every life is unique, let's live uniquely. Let's reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.

Y no me importa que la alegría haya pasado de moda, a lo mejor soy una idiota, pero los otros también son unos idiotas, con esa moda suya del escepticismo, no tengo ningún motivo para cambiar mi idiotez por la de ellos, no quiero que mi vida se parta por la mitad, quiero que sea una sola vida, una sola desde el principio hasta el final...

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere modernity

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill. Later:

Instead, it was a Christianity engaged with modernity (and postmodernity) — grappling with its issues, sensitive to its questions and concerns, aware of its spiritual vacuum, in vital dialogue with its artistic and intellectual leaders. It was a "third-way" faith seeking to steer a course that would avoid defensive retreat and isolation on the one hand and capitulation and sellout on the other.

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.

The privatisation of the symbolic sphere is a strictly relative affair, not least if one thinks of the various Victorian contentions over science and religion, the culture industry, the state regulation of sexuality and the like. Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States. Late modernity (or postmodernity, if one prefers) takes some of these symbolic practices back into public ownership.

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?

Music is always gonna change; it's just a matter of keeping up with the times.

but some conventions cannot

For the record, everything new is not worse than everything old.

the dignity and sobriety of old public buildings, their temple facades, would be assaulted and covered over by indiscriminate modernity; that new buildings, more severely efficient, would eventually replace them.

It is no accident that both of the substitutes for religion that Hoffer names—nationalism and social revolution—are political. Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity. Like the adherents of traditional religion, many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet critical questions with pious hostility.50 Instead of crusades or inquisitions, the twentieth century had its notorious totalitarian movements.

Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands... Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

Whatever we do as adults, we make in our children more of what we are. Is there no end to this? Scholars speak of progress, but I fear now that they are mistaken. This is not progress that we see, it is elaboration. Nothing of the old ways ever goes away, it just hides beneath modernity's confusion.