229 Quotes About Modernity

Nothing seems so completely outmoded as the modernities of yesterday.

Huizinga noticed that contemporary man behaves childishly, in the negative sense of the word--that is, in a way which is equal to the mental level of puberty: banal amusements; the absence of authentic humor; the need for strong sensations; the inclination to mass parades and slogans; and the expression of an exaggerated hate or love, blame or praise, which have a mass and brutal aspect.

Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly.

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.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

I distrust every idea that doesn’t seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

War in the era of machines could not possibly breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor or manliness ... It imposed upon men nothing but the experience of bare destruction together with the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic wheel of slaughter.

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