Quotes About Modern

the meaning of freedom can be fully understood only on the basis of an analysis of the whole character structure of modern man.

O homem moderno pensa que perde alguma coisa — o tempo — quando não faz as coisas rapidamente; todavia, ele não sabe o que fazer com o tempo que ganha — a não ser matá-lo.

the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.

In Kafka we have the modern mind, seemingly self-sufficient, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate real one – yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows Two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God.

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.

Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.

Ja sam moderan ?ovek i vrlo sam sklon samouništenju.

Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times." Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals.

Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.

She tooled around the city in an electric car.

Within reasonable limits, we gals all look alike nowadays, except for details.

It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.

modern man tries to replace vital awe and wonder with a "How to do it" manual.

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

To be sure, primitives often celebrate death—as Hocart and others have shown—because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form. Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up.

the great increase in bitterness and frustration in the modern world is largely due to the eclipse of the sacred dimension

modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience—and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control.

En un momento como el actual, en el que los ojos apenas se posan un instante en un tema antes de saltar a otro más escandaloso, más llamativo, los libros han de recuperar el ritmo lento, la necesidad de transcendencia imprescindible para que la reflexión y el aprendizaje brinden un mínimo de sentido a la sociedad moderna.

We have hundreds of virtual "friends" but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected.