Modernism Quotes - Page 6

• There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.'

  Raymond Loewy

  Race, Trash, Tinsel

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• The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".

  James Fenton

  Memories, Voice, Aftermath

  "Where poetry and music divide" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2002.

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• It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Funny, Marriage, Gone

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• Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

  Ronald Reagan

  Wall, Humor, Oxygen

  The Guardian, June 14, 1989.

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• The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Jesus, Real, People

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• As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

  Will Self

  Writing, Dark, Landscape

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

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• Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

  John Ruskin

  Teaching, Complaining, Literature

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• The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

  Vivian Gornick

  Desire, Fiction, Ends

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Misunderstood, Modern, Used

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• Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

  Mason Cooley

  Art, Avant Garde, Care

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• Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.

  Mason Cooley

  Stories, Literature, Insult

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• From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

  Martin Filler

  Museums, Views, Design

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• A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

  William Wordsworth

  Stupid, Mind, Acting

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.370

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• In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

  William Wordsworth

  Money, Business, Men

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• The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned.

  Mason Cooley

  Beginning Middle And End, Abandoned, Ends

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• Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Errors, Long

  1905 Heretics, ch.13.

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• I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.

  Billy Corgan

  Thinking, Skeletons, Opening Up

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• Modernism was a big thing for me, coming from a father who was very interested in art, music and culture - and almost always Italian art, music and culture. One good thing about Italians is that culture is part of everyday life. But Modernism is a movement of the past. The idea of a Modernist building as a sculpture set on a pedestal of grass is a part of Modernism that I'm not so crazy about.

  Vito Acconci

  Art, Father, Crazy

  Source: www.revelinnewyork.com

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• Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

  John Buchan

  Civilization, Modern Life, Quiet

  John Buchan (2011). “The Power-House”, p.28, House of Stratus

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• What is tragic today is that there is a number of Muslims who think that all the solutions are to be found simply by external actions. They don't have to do anything within themselves. This is a deeply Western idea - modern, Western idea, where you try to improve the world without improving yourself. And this is what the Muslims who talk about others putting their heads in the sand and that "We are doing jihad and we are political" and so forth, they are emulating a very important mistake of modernism.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Mistake, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I teach art at a famous art school, and yet I don't have really the least notion what post-modernism means, but we have people in the letters and science department that understand it quite well and the students go there if they want to understand what this term that is being bandied about is all about, but I've never understood it.

  Lawrence Jordan

  Art, School, Mean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Short attention span is the new avant-garde. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. David Markson feels particularly relevant now. Twitter is the revenge of modernism.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Revenge, Complaining, Attention

  "What Would Twitter Do?". Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. August 15, 2014.

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• The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Gun, Civilization, Religion

  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays "The State of German Literature" (1838)

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• Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.

  Mel Bochner

  Photography, Enemy, Late

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• I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.

  Liam Gillick

  Thinking, People, Design

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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