Modernity Quotes - Page 6

• [W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.

  John Christy

  Thinking, People, Humanity

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• In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Art, Skills, Differences

  Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

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• If there is something to permit the distinction between "solid" and "liquid" phases of modernity (that is, arranging them in an order of succession), it is the change in both the manifest and latent purpose behind the effort.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Order, Effort, Liquid

  Source: www.theoryculturesociety.org

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• There is reason to be scared. Look at what has happened with fundamentalism - this is a reaction against modernity. It happens to be cloaked in religion, but these are people saying enough is enough. It's happened again and again through history. The good news is that modernism has always won.

  Paul Saffo

  People, Looks, News

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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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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• 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.

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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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• 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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• 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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• The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.

  Allan Bloom

  Struggle, Self, Opposites

  Allan Bloom (1988). “Closing of the American Mind”, Simon & Schuster

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• Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.

  Pranab Mukherjee

  Modern India, Ideas, Constitution

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• When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.

  Alexander Kluge

  Thinking, Expression, People

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• High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

  Anthony Giddens

  Risk, Climate, Experts

  Anthony Giddens (2013). “Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”, p.127, John Wiley & Sons

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• To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the ineveitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.

  Anthony Giddens

  Fate, Destiny, Play

  Anthony Giddens (2013). “Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”, p.113, John Wiley & Sons

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• Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

  Robert Bork

  Children, Enlightenment, Reason

  Robert H. Bork (2010). “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• Once we decided to do a tower in New York, it had to say something about our group, reflecting the mix of modernity and creativity in our organization. It's a symbol.

  Bernard Arnault

  New York, Creativity, Organization

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• Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.

  Thomas Oden

  Christian, Morning, Mean

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• For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

  David Bentley Hart

  Rejection, Despair, Nihilism

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• Altermodern is an in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation, stressing the experience of wandering in time, space and mediums. The term 'altermodern has its roots in the idea of 'other-ness (Latin alter = 'other, with English connotation of 'different) and suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route. It suggests that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, symbolised by global financial crises.

  Nicolas Bourriaud

  Stress, Latin, Ideas

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• Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.

  Nicolas Bourriaud

  Fighting, Artist, Issues

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• Modern value-neutral society (Gesellschaft rather than Gemeinschaft) is systematized predation tempered not by conscience or values but rather merely by a system of law, which is no less corrupt with private interests and its own forms of predation. In modernity sophism is the order of the day, and this obliges its most adept practitioners to learn how to develop the art of appearing to be other than one actually is.

  Kenny Smith

  Art, Philosophy, Order

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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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• Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

  Octavio Paz

  Past, Thinking, Our Society

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