Modernity Quotes

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. (Charles Baudelaire)
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. View quote
Ulrich Beck
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion. View quote
Ulrich Beck
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned. View quote
Antonio Gramsci
In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity... It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal. View quote
Francois Furet
America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it. View quote
Ernest Gellner
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living. View quote
Roger Scruton
It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse.... (Irving Kristol)
The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.... the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal – a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth – a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere. View quote
Marsden Hartley
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. View quote
Andrzej Stasiuk
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. View quote
Peter L. Berger
When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business. View quote
Vera Wang
When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible. View quote
Alexander Kluge
As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing - as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law. View quote
Gary Bauer
You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition. View quote
Theodore Bikel
Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity - assimilation - simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
You see before you a man in his right mind Worldly-wise and with access to death Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies Having sometimes even astonished the professors Good with languages Having travelled a great deal Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform Having lost my best friends in the butchery As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know. View quote
Guillaume Apollinaire
Cubism demonstrated in its constructions its modernity in relation to scale, but in painting and contre-relief we have in front of us an absolute scale which is this - forms in their natural size in the ratio 1 : 1. If however we wish to transform the contre-relief into an architectural structure and therefore enlarge it by one hundred times, then the scale ceases to be absolute and becomes relative in the ratio of 1 : 100. Then we get the American statue of liberty in whose head there is room for four men and from whose hand the light streams out. (El Lissitsky)
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. View quote
Theodor Adorno
.. the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness. View quote
Umberto Boccioni
The primary meaning of the words "modern," "modernity," with which recent times have baptised themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of "the height of time" which I am at present analysing. "Modern" is what is "in the fashion, "that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word "modern" then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative call to be at the height of one's time. For the "modern" man, not to be "modern" means to fall below the historic level. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms. View quote
Leszek Kołakowski