126 Quotes About Modernism

The machine aesthetic bought something familiar to modern experience, but remote from architecture, to bear on modern architecture.

Everyone is still caught up in these postmodern gimmicks or they’re just trying to rip off their favorite modernist from high school. For poetry, it’s mostly the style made famous by T.S. Eliot. And fiction it’s usually Faulkner or Hemingway, the latter of which was never that interesting to begin with.

Today the elite - those who think of themselves as such - would be more likely to favor the garbage than the masses would. But they think they're holding the standards up by doing so. It's the movement toward modernism, in which all the old values have been inverted.

The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these ‘styles’. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers’ outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were ‘modernity’ and ‘functionalism’.

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know.

We entered an era of false alarms.

If every life is unique, let's live uniquely. Let's reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.

I believe that modernism itself is based on an error, an error in the understanding of who man is, an error in under- standing the nature of reality both metacosmic and cosmic. Modernism is based on an enormous deception, which is leading us to perdition and destroying the world.

My views on wealth redistribution were shaped largely by knowledge elites who earned their living by words and ideas--professors, writers, and movement leaders. Like most of the broadminded clergy I knew, I reasoned out of modern naturalistic premises, employing biblical narratives narrowly and selectively as I found them useful politically. The saving Grace of God on the cross was not in my mix of life changing ideas.