Modern, Modernism

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God. – Bryan Appleyard

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures. – Jean Baudrillard

You are born modern, you do not become so. – Jean Baudrillard

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. – Italo Calvino

A modern man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice. – Elias Canetti

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! – Lewis Carroll

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous. – Angela Carter

Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. – Le Corbusier

By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression. – Dan Cruickshank

Dont bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. – Salvador Dali

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. – Guy Debord

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. – Terry Eagleton

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to. – Edgar Z. Friedenberg

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. – Gunther Grass

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought. – Alexander Herzen

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out. – Robert Hewison

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it. – Eric Hoffer

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie. – R. D. Laing

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times — the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie — seem attractive by comparison. – Christopher Lasch