Modernism Quotes - Page 5

• Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.

  Erich Fromm

  Time, Learning, Knowledge

  Erich Fromm (2000). “The Art of Loving: The Centennial Edition”, p.99, A&C Black

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• This strange disease of modern life,
  With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Sick, Disease

  'The Scholar-Gipsy' (1853) l. 201

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• The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

  Upton Sinclair

  Credit, Slavery, Modern

  Upton Sinclair (1926). “Letters to Judd, an American Workingman”

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• The ablest men in all walks of modern life are men of faith. Most of them have much more faith than they themselves realize.

  Bruce Barton

  Life, Faith, Men

  Bruce Barton (1927). “What Can a Man Believe?”, McClelland & Stewart

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• Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

  Oscar Wilde

  Information, Modern, Source

  Oscar Wilde (2000). “The Plays of Oscar Wilde”, p.306, Wordsworth Editions

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• Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.

  Oscar Wilde

  Modern, Dangerous, Old Fashioned

  1895 Lord Mark by. An Ideal Husband, act 2.

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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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• American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Time, Europe, History

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• The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

  C. Wright Mills

  Fate, Years, Best Year

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.6, Oxford University Press

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• Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

  John Berger

  Mean, Cutting, Past

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• So many people's school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn't care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don't like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  Crazy, School, People

  "Oh No Lev Grossman No". nielsenhayden.com. August 30, 2009.

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• People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

  Campbell McGrath

  School, Years, People

  "Campbell McGrath on Poetry, Walt Whitman and Schaefer Beer" by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. March 01, 2008.

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• Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind.

  Kenny Smith

  Wisdom, Self, Mind

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• If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

  Gunter Grass

  Age, Dawn, Principles

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

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• Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

  John Walford

  Art, Overcoming, Problem

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• My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

  Peter Gay

  Definitions

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

  Raymond Loewy

  Race, Trash, Tinsel

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• I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Simple, Artist, People

  "Expositions and Developments". Book by Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, pp. 113-114, 1959.

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• The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

  John Berger

  Artist, Giving, Desire

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• Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

  Miguel Syjuco

  Objectivity, Subjectivity, Reactions

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• Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Depressing, Art, Games

  Harold Rosenberg (1983). “Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations”, p.71, University of Chicago Press

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• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Many with careers in the art world are intimidated, and afraid to speak out against the gospels of Modernist theory.

  Kara Ross

  Art, Speaks Out, Careers

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• A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Powerful, Past, Ethos

  "My Dearest Daughter: A letter from the Death Cell". Book by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, p. 15, 2007.

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• There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism.

  Pope Pius XI

  Catholic, Moral, Social

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