229 Quotes About Modernity
- Author Nick Land
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Modernity invented the future, but that’s all over. In the current version ‘progressive history’ camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory. You want it so badly it’s a slow scream in your head, deleting itself into bliss.
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- Author Paul Murray
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People don't want the truth,' he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. 'They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.
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- Author I. M. Pei
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Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.
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- Author W.H. Auden
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Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long.
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- Author Thomas C. Oden
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I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming.
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- Author Tony Hendra
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History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.
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- Author Colin E. Gunton
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An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost.
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- Author Henri Lefebvre
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What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
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- Author Milan Kundera
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And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
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