Quotes About Modernity

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

The economic crisis, so conveniently operated and driven by the markets, by financial groups, by the needs of a globalized economy, faces the task of restoring social control, which the crisis of modernity lost sight of.

The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the consumer–commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation of that pattern to interhuman relations.

Una vez que el rígido marco de los estamentos sociales fue quebrado, la tarea de "autoidentificación" impuesta a los hombres y mujeres de la modernidad temprana quedó reducida al desafío de vivir "fiel a su clase" ("a la altura de los vecinos"), de adecuarse a los tipos sociales de clases emergentes y modelos de conducta, de imitar, siguiendo un patrón, de "aculturarse", sin perder el paso ni desviarse de la norma.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To 'be modern' means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just 'to be', let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever 'becoming', avoiding completion, staying underdefined.

Cuando la relación está inspirada por las ganas ("las miradas se encuentran a través de una habitación atestada"), sigue la pauta del consumo y sólo requiere la destreza de un consumidor promedio, moderadamente experimentado. Al igual que otros productos, la relación es para consumo inmediato (no requiere una preparación adicional ni prolongada) y para uso único, "sin perjuicios". Primordial y fundamentalmente, es descartable.

What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.

From the start and to this very day, modernity was about forcing nature to serve obediently human needs, ambitions and desires –

The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. ... Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

The premodern world directed us to read so little because it was obsessed by a question modernity likes to dodge: what is the point of reading?

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

In this convoluted world where sex has become a party favor rather than a solemn, beautiful part of love between two people, I think virginity is sexy. I don't like promiscuity. Oddly, at the turn of the 20th century, even men were expected to wait until marriage to indulge. I think that's sexy, too. Okay, I'm a dinosaur, I admit it. I don't belong in the modern world.

The world is changing and so is fashion.

The root problem with the bloated image of the artist that haunts modernity, I suggest, is not the way the artist is being pictured but the model of divine transcendence that feeds it (and which in turn is fed by it). What kind of deity lurks there?

Paraya,baÅŸar?ya ve piyasan?n iktidar?na tapma,modern putperestliÄŸin ortak ve etkili bir biçimidir.

You have captured the whole world, man, you are everywhere. Everywhere you introduce what you call modernity, the era of change, what you call progress. But we want neither you nor your progress here. We do not desire the changes you bring. We do not desire anything you bring.

This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

I think a lot of things have become associated with the Right. For example, an unapologetic commitment to progress and modernity is now almost always associated with neo-conservatism whereas it traditionally used to be associated with left-wing thinking and moving society forward.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.