Modernity Quotes

1. "If they analyze the situation as thoroughly as they should, Muslims will realize they are the first targets. What are the fundamentalists really after? Simply taking over Islam and then turning its back on modernity."
Author: Alexander Haig

2. "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."
Author: Amin Maalouf

3. "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."
Author: Andrzej Stasiuk

4. "The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."
Author: Antonio Gramsci

5. "And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie."
Author: Berenice Marlohe

6. "I really enjoyed 'Casino Royale' because suddenly something changed with this modernity and with Daniel bringing life to James Bond in a very new way."
Author: Berenice Marlohe

7. "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."
Author: Bill Buford

8. "And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill."
Author: Bram Stoker

9. "If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term."
Author: Bruno Latour

10. "The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this."
Author: Bruno Latour

11. "Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity."
Author: Dan Savage

12. "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."
Author: David Bentley Hart

13. "Modernity is a busy place, spinning with silicon speed that goes ever faster but never forward, people pressed into cities full of loneliness."
Author: Douglas Wilson

14. "Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself."
Author: Douglas Wilson

15. "Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year."
Author: Dylan Moran

16. "Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that "modernity" is ending proclaim a "postmodern age."
Author: Felipe Fernández Armesto

17. "I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern."
Author: Francois Cluzet

18. "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..."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

19. "What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

20. "Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order."
Author: Irving Howe

21. "When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?"
Author: James Gleick

22. "If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions."
Author: James K.A. Smith

23. "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food."
Author: Jill Lepore

24. "For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk."
Author: Jürgen Habermas

25. "Traditions brings continuity to one's existence, but this sort of continuity is precisely what has been increasingly lostthroughout modernity."
Author: Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

26. "Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity."
Author: Michel De Certeau

27. "If the first decade of the 21st century can be summarized in one scene, It will definitely be the collision of the two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (New York) September 11, 2001, the scene represents the collision of the «mentality of the 7th century» that uses the «products of modernity» to attack modernity itself, in the 21st century within the heart of the city that is the capital of the modern world.?? ???? ????? ????? ????? ?? ????? ?????? ? ??????? ?? ???? ????? ????? ??? ????? ???? ?????? ????????? ????? ???? ??????? ??????? ?? (???????) 11 ?????? 2001? ???? ???? ????? ????? ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ?????? ? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ?? ????? ?????? ???????."
Author: Mustafa Badr

28. "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

29. "Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

30. "Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur"
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

31. "The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
Author: Paul De Man

32. "I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization."
Author: Peter L. Berger

33. "His concept of allochrony - initially introduced shyly as 'untimeliness', then later radicalized to an exit from modernity - is based on the idea, as suggestive as it is fantastic, that antiquity has no need of repetitions enacted in subsequent periods, because it 'essentially' returns constantly on its own strength. In other words, antiquity - or the ancient - is not an overcome phase of cultural development that is only represented in the collective memory and can be summoned by the wilfulness of education. It is rather a kind of constant present - a depth time, a nature time, a time of being - that continues underneath the theatre of memory and innovation that occupies cultural time."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

34. "Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity."
Author: Pranab Mukherjee

35. "As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity."
Author: Richard Holbrooke

36. "Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason."
Author: Robert Bork

37. "O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men - to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us - with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

38. "Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself."
Author: Robert Hughes

39. "Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity."
Author: Robertson Davies

40. "John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of 'immorality' (he wrote in favour of divorce and married three times), an over-serious classicist, and an arrogant believer in his own greatness as a poet. He was all these things. But, above all, Milton's was the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance. The values expressed in all his works are the values of tolerance, freedom and self-determination, expressed by Shakespeare, Hooker and Donne. The basis of his aesthetic studies was classical, but the modernity of his intellectual interests can be seen in the fact that he went to Italy (in the late 1630s) where he met the astronomer Galileo, who had been condemned as a heretic by the Catholic church for saying the earth moved around the sun."
Author: Ronald Carter

41. "I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade."
Author: Sara Sheridan

42. "One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity."
Author: Tariq Ramadan

43. "What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conondrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another?"
Author: Terry Tempest Williams

44. "You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition."
Author: Theodore Bikel

45. "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."
Author: Thomas C. Oden

46. "The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity."
Author: Thomas C. Oden

47. "Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do."
Author: Tiffany Madison

48. "The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true." p141"
Author: Tim Butcher

49. "All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many."
Author: Ulrich Beck

50. "After he wrote The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz got fervent amens from European governments as well as individual readers for insisting that the management of your focus has become one of decision-laden modernity's major challenges. Many behavioral economists and social psychologists also share his concern about what he calls "the consequences of mis-attention."
Author: Winifred Gallagher

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