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Modernity Quotes

Browse 366 quotes about Modernity.

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Modernity Quotes

“The couldn't-care-less boys, the chaps who imagined that now that the war was over there was no need for further effort, the soldiers that slopped past officers without saluting, the Very Important Persons who talked eloquent tripe with their lips and dissembled in their fatty hearts, the morons and the knaves who played for the present rather than the future, the cacklers at parties and the delighters in horses' legs, they weren't trying to try because they thought that nobody else was trying to try either. It was, of course, a contagion from which the world had always suffered, but it was much more dangerous now than in the time of Charles the Second, when boys of nineteen had not been able to destroy cathedrals by pressing buttons.”

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Book:Vespers in Vienna
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“The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.”

SelfLastsSpiritTurnsStruggleConflictOppositesInstrumentsTensionConspiracyBowsManhoodTenseModernityPsychiatristJesuit
Book:Closing of the American Mind
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“Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.”

MenMeanHas BeensLife IsTermWorstCostOvercomingDepthHeightObsessedThinkerWorth LivingModernityNihilismLiving OnBourgeoisRepresentingIllusoryContinentalLife Is Not Worth Living
Author:Allan Bloom
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“What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.”

MayFormReligiousAcceptingDemocracyCriticalBelieverCeaseReasonableRestraintDiscourseModernityMaintenanceNon BelieverLiberal Democracy
Author:Andrew Sullivan
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“I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism”

YearsMotherValuesBreakModernHumilityEnlightenmentMethodBillionsPostsFragileAutismEleganceModernityMother NatureRobustEruditionTripletNerdiness
Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.. ..the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal - a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth - a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere.”

IdeasRealEarthCoursesSunFireFashionEssentialsEssenceUniversalAffectionAttachmentSwingsModernity
Author:Marsden Hartley
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“The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.”

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Author:Ian Bremmer
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“Readers have no doubt noticed how seldom builders live in houses of their own construction. You will find a town or village expanding in all directions with their masterpieces of modernity in the way of houses and bungalows; but the builder himself you will usually find living nearer the heart of things, snugly and comfortably housed in some more substantial, if less convenient, building of less recent date.”

IfsWayHeartHouseDoubtBuildingReaderTownsNo DoubtVillageConstructionMasterpieceExpandingConvenientModernityBuilder
Book:Lark Rise to Candleford
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“Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.”

MadeReasonWould BeBornRaceProgressGratitudeDeserveTinyEndlessEnlightenedLinksLapModernityRelaysRelay Races
Book:Origins: A Memoir
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“The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.”

MenWorldFaithFoundWaitingWealthEffortRaceProgressModernThis WorldMinesGeniusOrdinaryEssenceOrganizationAncientPursuitOrganizedSolitaryVeinsModernityMiningOrdinary ManModern ManNuggetsWealth Of Knowledge
Author:William Wickenden
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“Modernity is the ensemble of changes - intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic - that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.”

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Author:George Scialabba
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“Lee was very much his own person so it's impossible to know quite what he would have thought but part of the reason for me staying is that I believe he always wanted this to be a house that would be here forever, that he never wanted his name not to mean anything any more. And I want that too. I want Alexander McQueen to continue. Then, in a hundred years time, there will still be this house that he created, this great place that represents modernity and creativity and beauty and romance and all of those things. That, I think, would be amazing.”

ThinkingKnowsWantYearsBelieveMeanPersonsStillsReasonWould BeWantedRomanceHouseNamesI BelieveCreativityForeverImpossibleHundredStayingModernityMcqueen
Author:Sarah Burton
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