Quotes About Modernity

As a character in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, "Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is.

By encouraging anyone to capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one's self—in some cases, even to the point of earning a living by it—it warps our understanding of our own existence and its relation to others. That this should become the manner of being for us all is surely the definitive dystopic vision of late modernity. But perhaps it was foretold by the metastatic proliferation of the attention merchants' model throughout our culture.

The painter's Volhynia Experiment can be seen as an attempt to hold back the tide of time, to preserve the native Ukrainian-Polish-Jewish social order, while tolerating emerging modern national differences. It can also be understood as a kind of alternative modernity, a multiculturalism avant la lettre,in which state policies were designed not to build a single nation, but rather to accommodate the inevitable differences among several.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature

You are remarkably modern, Mabel. A little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern.  One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. 

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

the idea of a crusade against social modernity was to be found not only in the market towns of north-central Castile, or in the remote rural north (most obviously among the theocratic and pugnacious Carlists of Navarre) but also in larger urban centres and the big cities, where Catholic youth became activists in the new mass organizations of the right.

La lucha contra el aburrimiento ha comenzado. No sabemos si el enemigo público será derrotado. Y sin embargo de esta lucha, de este desafío, depende, hasta cierto punto, el destino y sentido de la modernidad.

interrelated. In contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and the world can be understood but not completely mastered.

As Jewish historian Yuri Slezkine noted, modernity has turned us all into Jews. ("The Jewish Century," 2004.) Modernism is the dysfunction that results from making oneself God. Modern man is the Jew, the heretic, the anti-hero, alienated from God, society and paradoxically himself. He lives in a self-created reality divorced from truth.

Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.

'Hamlet' is so modern; 'Coriolanus' is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us.

Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him.

The stupidity of all commercial or cultural anti- Americanism. As if Americanism did not run through every society, every nation, and every individual today, like modernity itself.

La mode, c'est ce qui se démode.

Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason.

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

The fashion cycle is outdated.

Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country.