Quotes About Modernity

An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost.

Fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity. It is a reaction usually based on profound fear and defensiveness against "losing the faith.

For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.

Fashion is something which is non-lasting; it's ephemeral.

The new atheism has attracted considerable attention today, but apart from the public hype, it offers no substantial change or direction to modernity's problems. Religion may be the opium of the masses but atheism offers no new yeast as leaven for the masses.

Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.

Nietzsche wanted to explode the framework of Occidental rationalism within which the competitors of Left and Right Hegelianism still moved. His antihumanism, continued by Heidegger and Bataille in two variations, is the real challenge for the discourse of modernity.

You only live once!' we are told. `You might miss out on something!' This hunger for pleasure, for possessions, for power; the thirst for recognition through success and admiration - that is the perversion of modem men and women. That is their godlessness. The person who loses God makes a god out of himself. And in this way a human being becomes a proud and unhappy mini-god.

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

Through the emphasis on the everyday, mass consumption, and experience visual culture does concentrate mainly on the study of modernity – in this case the world in the post-World War II era.

I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.

That's the fun thing about fashion: it changes. One day, we're into short, the next we're into full length for day, or half short and long.

The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe.

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

Composers, too, wanted to celebrate Russia's new modernity. The most avant-garde among them now created pieces full of dark, knotted chords and thunderous declarations, or music like sculptures of crystal: sharp, hard structures with jutting spikes and dazzling surfaces.

Nothing stays avant-garde forever; you have to keep moving.

Venecia, hasta cadavérica como está ahora, lanza una provocación insoportable al mundo de la modernidad. Son susurros lo que esta Venecia consigue lanzar, pero son insoportables para el mundo de la técnica, para esa técnica que invade Venecia por masas de turistas, pero también por la veleidad de los arquitectos indignos de tal nombre." aka Rem Koolhaas.

It is rare in today's turbulent world to find a city that so harmoniously mixes tradition and modernity, without enslaving itself to either one.

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.

That was in the past - we're in the future now.

to "set the standard for beauty in classical and modem cookery, and attest to the distant future that the French chefs of the 19th century were the most famous in the world.

The future is not what it used to be.