Quotes About Modernity

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.

ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age.

All of a sudden, people are going to decide they want to go micro, everything's smaller.

Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.

I don't want to be boring, and I never want people to think it's a snoozefest. I want to find the middle point between looking classic and also trying something new.

The '80s was the time for the great so-called modernization in Spain. It was a moment when it seemed that everything was breaking up and moving fast into modernity.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow into the neurotic first one. […] the second fellow reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

La maldición de la modernidad es que cada vez estamos más colonizados por una clase de personas cuya capacidad para explicar las cosas supera a su capacidad de comprensión. O cuya capacidad explicativa supera a sus acciones.

The optimal solution to being independent and upright while remaining a social animal is: to seek first your own self-respect and, secondarily and conditionally, that of others, provided your external image does not conflict with your own self-respect. Most people get it backwards and seek the admiration of the collective and something called "a good reputation" at the expense of self-worth for, alas, the two are in frequent conflict under modernity.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people "arbitraging" the system. These people will be named by name. Poets and painters are free, liberi poetae et pictores, and there are severe moral imperatives that come with such freedom. First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Modernity provides too many variables (but too little data per variable), and the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information, as noise is convex and information is concave. Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

Nykyaika: loimme nuoruuden ilman sankaruutta, iän ilman viisautta ja elämän ilman loistoa.