Quotessence
Home / Topics / Postmodern Quotes

Postmodern Quotes

Browse 106 quotes about Postmodern.

Related topics

PostmodernismWorldModernModernismKindPeopleThinkingCulture

Postmodern Quotes

“I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.”

PlayFeelingsRomanceStrongActingEmotionAudienceStrengthEmotionalDramaDemandWeaknessRomanticLonelyWeakTheaterYoung AdultTheatreAloneSuspenseFakeDramaticMaskControlHidingPretendingForbiddenGothicFeelSelf ImageAlwaysPostmodernismHidePretendActorGothMasksPostmodernGothic RomanceActressDemandingEmotionlessForbidSternYoung Adult Gothic RomanceExactExactingFeelless
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
Create image

“Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...”

LoveLifeDifferentSelfPlayRealityRomanceUnderstandingRelationshipsActingKnowledgeRolesRelationshipAwarenessIdentityLivingRomanticSelf AwarenessCrisisYoung AdultReal LifeSuspenseMaskLiveKnow YourselfGothicFactUnderstandKnowSelf ImagePostmodernismHideHiddenActorGothAwareMasksPostmodernPlayingGothic RomanceRoleEvenYoung Adult Gothic RomanceSelf Identity CrisisKnow Myself
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
Create image

“And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...”

TryingRealPlayRealityRomanceLostPerfectSecretRolesMysteryIdentityRomanticPerfectionLonelyWho You AreStriveYoung AdultWho I AmObsessionMysteriousSuspenseMaskBe YourselfPretendingYourselfGothicObsessiveLoseTryPostmodernismHidePretendHiddenGothRealizeMasksSecretiveMyselfPostmodernGothic RomanceRoleCardewFreyaYoung Adult Gothic RomanceMaskedYoung Adult Suspense
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
Create image

“Pod kvazi-mitskim totalitetom tehničke racionalnosti prijeti nam inteligencija bez patosa, inteligencija kojoj nije potreban nikakav jezik koji ima svoj vlastiti smisao jer ionako sve funkcionira bez bilo kakvog proturječja; ta inteligencija ne zna za spomen jer nije ugrožena nikakvim zaboravom: čovjek kao kompjuterizirana inteligencija bez osjetljivosti na patnju i bez morala, ukratko: čovjek kao rapsodija nedužnosti jednoga glatko funkcionirajućeg stroja. Treba li doista to biti čovjek nakon smrti čovjeka?”

SufferingModernEthicsPostmodernFuture Of Man
Book:Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft
Create image

“Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.”

ReasonPhilosophyEnlightenmentPostmodernKant
Book:Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism And Socialism From Rousseau To Foucault
Create image

“Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansia che ci fosse qualcosa di meglio su un'altra cartuccia e che potenzialmente se lo stava perdendo. Poi si rese conto che avrebbe avuto tutto il tempo di godersi ogni cartuccia e capì intellettualmente che non aveva senso provare il panico di perdersi qualcosa.”

InspirationalAmericanPostmodernInfinite JestDfwDavid Foster WallaceIj
Book:Infinite Jest
Create image

“Packed with fascinating personal perspective and testimony, Michael Takiffs A Complicated Man wholly justifies its title. The book is far more than a kaleidoscopic oral biography of President Bill Clinton. Aspect by aspect, it guides us through the struggles of postmodern America, as the most ambitious baby boomer of his generation seeks to modernize the Democratic Party-and, as in a Greek drama, is fated to be destroyed. Veritably, an all-American saga, with a cast of thousands-favorable and unfavorable.”

MenBookAmericaPresidentPartyStruggleGenerationsPerspectiveBabyDramaAspectBillsDemocraticClintonCastsComplicatedGuidesDestroyedTitlesGreekFascinatingJustifyAmbitiousBiographiesTestimonyDemocratic PartySagaPostmodernBoomersBaby BoomerPresident Bill ClintonGreek Drama
Author:Nigel Hamilton
Create image

“What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

PeopleTryingReasonGuyTragedyInstitutionsNotionSelfishAssGreekNo ReasonLightningHittingIndifferentDoomedBoltsAchillesOlympianPostmodernGreek TragedyWhippingHurlingOedipusLightning BoltsOlympian Gods
Author:David Simon
Create image

“Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.”

ThinkingKindHappensLastsNightStyleAuthorityAwakeProphetPoundsSpokesSolitaryPostmodernismAuthorshipJoycePostmodernEliotWastelandWoolfAwake At NightYeats
Author:Jonathan Raban
Create image

“Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.”

IdeasRealityFoundSexRaceAttitudeClassDangerousCivilizationTruth IsPerceptionAttributesEthnicityPostmodernRace Ethnicity
Book:The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990-1994
Create image

“If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image.”

IfsWorldViewsModernStageDesignMovedStructurePoint Of ViewRealmsThemePoeticRealismExtensionsRemindersPlaywrightTangibleTheatricalRomanticismPostmodernPictorial
Book:Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography
Create image

“Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.”

BookEnoughLanguageNovelPicksListsPostsCheerObserversLecturesModernismPostmodernInterviewers
Book:Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007
Create image

“The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular-journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography-have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning.”

YearsHas BeensArtFormPracticeStudyImpossibleParticularTheoryFinePhotographyTraditionalJournalismGenreFlawsShellsRepresentationDocumentariesFine ArtsPostmodernArt Photography
Author:Richard Misrach
Create image

“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”

BelieveChildrenWholeParentResponsibilityModernChildhoodSecurityPerceptionProtectionInnocentCompetenceCompetentPostmodernResponsibility For Children
Book:Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance
Create image

“It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image”

HumansMatterFormDiesIndividualProcessVoiceWealthHuman BeingsModernExerciseCapitalismOrganizationManagementDressesSlaveryPrivilegeExtremesContemporaryManagersEmployeeArbitraryPostmodernTerminology
Author:Kenneth Cloke
Create image

“Without a thorough and deeply rooted understanding of the biblical view of truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, eternally engaging, antithetical and exclusive, unified and systematic, and as an end in itself, the Christian response to postmodernism will be muted by the surrounding culture or will make illicit compromises with the truth-impoverished spirit of the age. The good news is that truth is still truth, that it provides a backbone for witness and ministry in postmodern times, and that God's truth will never fail.”

StillsEndsAgeChristianSpiritCultureUnderstandingViewsFailingTruth IsNewsUniversalAbsolutesResponseObjectivesCompromiseWitnessRootedMinistryBiblicalEngagingGood NewsExclusiveSystematicThoroughBackboneUnifiedPostmodernismPostmodern
Author:Douglas Groothuis
Create image

“I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939....His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world....I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time.”

WorldBelieveHumansWellsMayArtSpiritualArtistI BelieveSocialUnderstandingCommunityJusticeHuman BeingsCreativityCenturyGeniusDiedOriginalsSocial JusticeSaintCommittedFeministValuableBitterOur TimeGiantsSpiritual LifeChaptersMentorTwentieth CenturyPsychologistPsychoanalysisPostmodernGreat SpiritualDeep Understanding
Author:Matthew Fox
Create image

“There are also two Christianities in the world today. There is (1) the Christianity of the New Testament, and there is (2) the Christianity of accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, "Enlightenment" rationalism or postmodern irrationalism. New converts to the first Christianity are constantly amazed and scandalized by finding many of their clergy to be in love with the second and in fear of the first.”

WorldFirstsTwoTodayChristianityPsychologyFindingsEnlightenmentHumanismPopsIndividualismSecularAmazedTestamentNew TestamentWorld TodayModernismNaturalismClergyRationalismRelativismPostmodernAccommodationsEgalitarianismNicenessSecular HumanismSubjectivism
Author:Peter Kreeft
Create image

“It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.”

ThinkingWorldSaidTodayBeautifulForceDarkDarknessModernDangerThreatProfoundHealSaviorPostmodernShallowness
Book:Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition
Create image

“American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.”

ThinkingHumansStillsTodayEvilSidesViewsMiddleJudgingOrdinaryWeakBasesFolksWanderGet BetterConfusedSentimentsProgressiveDividedRainbowButtonsPostmodernPlasters
Author:Os Guinness
Create image