Modernity Quotes - Page 3

• You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.

  Pascal Bruckner

  Daughter, Mother, Father

  Source: www.mantlethought.org

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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.

  William Wickenden

  Faith, Men, Essence

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• you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

  G. Willow Wilson

  Spiritual, Oneness, Concern

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• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

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• This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

  Andrzej Stasiuk

  Country, Names, Fiction

  Andrzej Stasiuk (2009). “Fado”

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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.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Nihilism

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, pp. 157-158, 1987.

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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.

  Flora Thompson

  Heart, House, Doubt

  Flora Thompson, H. J. Massingham (2009). “Lark Rise to Candleford”, p.308, David R. Godine Publisher

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• For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.

  George W. S. Trow

  Men, Tradition, Restless

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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.

  Amin Maalouf

  Gratitude, Race, Progress

  Amin Maalouf (2008). “Origins: A Memoir”, p.412, Macmillan

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• As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

  Richard Holbrooke

  Country, Views, People

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• It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse.

  Irving Kristol

  Spiritual, Ironic, Church

  Irving Kristol (1995). “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea”, p.440, Simon and Schuster

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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.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Religious, Democracy, May

  "Of Modern Faith". "The Daily Dish", December 14, 2008.

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• I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?

  Andrew Sullivan

  Insecure, Thinking, People

  "Of Modern Faith". "The Daily Dish", December 14, 2008.

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• Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Needs, Becoming, Rich

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.26, Random House

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• Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Distance, Relevant, Sensational

  "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder". Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2012.

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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

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Mother, Humility, Years

  "The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms". Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2010.

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• We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.

  Tony Kushner

  Rocks, Progress, Desire

  Tony Kushner (2013). “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition”, p.275, Theatre Communications Group

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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.

  Marsden Hartley

  Fashion, Real, Fire

  "Marsden Hartley". Book by by Gail R. Scott, p. 49; reprinted in "On art", p. 62, 1988.

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• Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.

  Graham Harvey

  Issues, Addresses, Way

  Graham Harvey (2013). “Animism: Respecting the Living World”, p.12, Columbia University Press

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• Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Christian, Crazy, Rights

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• Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.

  Huston Smith

  People, Humanity, Religion

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• Simple yet succinct, Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals exposes the idols of modernity and provides the biblical arsenal needed for their complete destruction. Trevin Wax provides medicine for the heart in this short, powerful study. Read it and be blessed.

  Daniel L. Akin

  Powerful, Blessed, Heart

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• There's a lot of particularly good things going on in my life at the moment. It's the fact that I get to be an ambassador for the concept of modernity. I can be creative and useful. And I don't have to grow up.

  Matthew Healy

  Growing Up, Creative, Ambassadors

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• I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that... Freud was always saying he was a scientist.

  Marina Warner

  Dream, Character, Interesting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Helping Africans navigate the transition to modernity with a huge, wonderful wildlife resource still intact.

  Patrick Bergin

  Transition, Wildlife, Helping

  "African Wildlife Foundation, Veronica Varekova and Patrick Bergin". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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