Modernisation Quotes

I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea. (Neil Kinnock)

We are absolutely sure that, without urgent modernisation, the Russian economy has no future, even with the enormous natural resources Russia has.

Dmitry Medvedev

We can hope that the ways of peace will attract the Arabic nations, for their territory and opportunities are broad enough for immeasurable advance, if the energies vented in spleen, are turned instead to a modernisation of the technology, a restoration of the soil, and a renovation of the economic, social, and political structure of those great and venerable lands.

Isaac Asimov

...there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.

H. G. Wells

He applied himself with vigour to the development and modernisation of his State and the progress of its people. He is credited with giving shape to the plans for construction of the Nagarjuna Sagar, the Srisailam Project, the Sriram Sagar and the Vamsadhara projects which are, among the most important milestones in the development of this region. If today, Andhra Pradesh is hailed as the granary of South India, much credit is due to him.

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy

Football is a personal interest which has been turned into a philanthropic initiative directed at encouraging social cohesion during the difficult process of African modernisation.

Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi

I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.

Francis Fukuyama

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed.

Vince Cable

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

Bruno Latour

The Shah described the modernisation of Iran as the principal goal of his life, and yet he adamantly refused to see that there could be no veritable modernisation without democracy. He often referred to his Swiss education as part of his credentials as a profoundly committed democrat, but was, at the same time, convinced that Iran was not yet ripe for democracy, and that it was his duty as 'the father of the nation' to save the Iranians from a slothful life of prayer, pilgrimage, small commerce, backward farming and cottage industry. He also wanted to turn Iran into a second Japan, make her one of the five or six major world powers by the end of the century. He regarded himself as the custodian of Iran's grandeur and freedom and in later years he extended his self-proclaimed mission of saving Iran to include the entire world.

Amir Taheri

Theories of modernisation are cod-scientific projections of Enlightenment values. They tell us nothing about the future. But they do help us to understand the present. They show the lingering power of the Christian faith that history is a moral drama, a tale of progress or redemption, in which - despite everything we know of it - morality rules the world. (John N. Gray)

Any discussion of Muslim intellectual life in the twentieth century must take into account the defining context of modernisation, with its dislocating effects on structural, economic, societal, political and cultural realities in Muslim countries.

Suha Taji-Farouki

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Western social Darwinists, who include modernisation and development theorists and their kindred spirits (UN agencies, human rights organisations and activists, NGOs, the IMF, the World Bank, the US State Department, etc) would see the possible "advance" of the Arab world (as well as the rest of the "underdeveloped" world) toward a western-defined and sponsored modernity as part of a historical teleology wherein non-Europeans who are still at the stage of European childhood will eventually replicate European "progress" toward modern forms of organisation, sociality, economics, politics and sexual desires. What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible.

Joseph Massad

In conditions of free enterprise and competition, one does not have to contrive modernisation or introduce it by government decree. It happens, and keeps on happening, of its own accord. A firm or an industry or an attitude which is no longer modern simply does not survive; it goes under and is replaced by others which are modern. Our motor industry, our chemical industry, yes, our steel industry, do not have to be told to modernise themselves. They keep on doing it because they have to, in order to export and meet the challenge of a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing world. If Britain wants to be modern, there is no substitute for the system of competitive free enterprise by which the Tory Party stands.

Enoch Powell