Quotes About Modernity

The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these 'styles'. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers' outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were 'modernity' and 'functionalism'.

A modern person has no energy to love any other time than his own.

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

He looked around at the others....They were all staring at their computers, or reading books or newspapers. Not one of them has noticed the weather. Maybe that's how the world was now....Everyone was so wrapped up in his or her own little world that no one ever really saw anything anymore.

with a big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as Oz's West Witch on the door and custom fiber-wiring for a tri-modem TP console.

Poor Nelly, she was not to know that fashions in sin change as much as other fashions.

If you're behind the curve, you're on the crest of a wave.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

Times do keep changing - thank God.

That was then. This is now.

Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913.

It's a new game now, you know, you have to bring some fresh stuff.

In the old days, a con man would be good looking, suave, well dressed, well spoken and presented themselves real well. Those days are gone because it's not necessary. The people committing these crimes are doing them from hundreds of miles away.

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.

There is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancy of dress.

Our civilization has moved through three world views: from paganism (no pity and no pacifism) to Christianity (pity but not pacifism) to modernity (pity and pacifism). It is now moving to postmodernity, which is a new pacifism, a pacifism without spiritual warfare, a war on the very notion of spiritual warfare, and a war without pity or mercy for its enemy

Modern culture's insatiable appetite for photo-ops keeps the not-so-accomplished Tinkerbelles from gracefully slipping into obscurity where they should have remained in the first place.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

The answers we need in 2020 are not going to be same as in 2015 or 2010, let alone 1997.

My apartment looks like no one lives in it.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.