Quotes About Modernity

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

I always tend to favor the newer idea.

I don't like a lot of feathers and frills. I like a clean aesthetic, a Calvin Klein aesthetic.

Technologically, I live in the 17th century; I don't have a computer, I don't have any of that stuff. I don't look at the Internet, although I know people tell me I'm all over it. Somebody told me they Googled me, and they said I was mentioned two million times, some stupid thing... but who cares?

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller. The experiment has failed.

There were the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.

America's vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It's the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.

We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.

My personal ambition remains the same - to be creative, to be modern, to stay one step ahead, to enjoy life.

The thing I'm most thankful for right now is elastic waistbands.

The white pump is the new nude heel.

The future is not so interesting for me because the future doesn't exist. I am really focused on the contemporary.

I like to move with the times and that's why my songs are fresh.

Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

There is something about Prince William and Prince Harry that brings real modernity to the British royal family. They are also very open, human, and kind, and this is what I have tried to capture in the pictures I have taken of them as well as in my pictures of Prince William and Catherine.

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose. What is chosen does not matter; the meaning is in the choice itself. There is no sacred order, no other world, no fixed virtues and permanent truths. There is only here and now and the eternal flame of human desire. Volo ergo sum—I want, therefore I am.

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct.