Modernity Quotes - Page 3

• Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Age, Heroism, Youth

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.31, Random House

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Lying, Growing, May

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1764, Random House

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Ian Bremmer

  Curves, Risk, Transition

  "The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall". Book by Ian Bremmer, 2006.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

  Bill Buford

  Running, Hands, Made

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

  Graham Harvey

  Doe, Way, Being Human

  Graham Harvey (2005). “Animism”, p.21, Columbia University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

  Salman Rushdie

  Order, Voice, Islam

  "Moderate Muslims must roar, says Rushdie". www.cnn.com. November 3, 2001.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.

  Kenny Smith

  Self, Words Of Wisdom, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

  Ulrich Beck

  Secular Society, Overcoming, Assumption

  "Risky business" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2006.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Abortion is without a doubt one of the greatest moral evils within modernity. As the "Advocate of Christian Memory," a pope must take up the mantle of defending the culture of life - a defense the Early Church held against the pagans of Rome.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Memories, Rome

  8 Copy quote

• America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

  Ernest Gellner

  America, Modern, Achieve

  "Anthropology and Politics". Book by Ernest Gellner, 1995.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are called to see that the Church does not adapt its thinking to the horizons that modernity prescribes for it but rather that it brings to those horizons the powerful antidote of God's truth. It is not the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being demythologised.

  David F. Wells

  Powerful, Thinking, Church

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of those blocks (that prevent the 'Middle East from entering the mainstream of modernity') is the orthodox tenet that the Koran and the scriptures contain all the knowledge required to deal with the problems of contemporary society.

  Arnold Beichman

  Block, Scripture, Middle East

  46 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source