Modernism Quotes

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

Christopher Lasch

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Jean Francois Lyotard

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

William Wordsworth

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.

R. D. Laing

For we which now behold these present days have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

William Shakespeare

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Lewis Carroll

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Paul De Man

But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.

Stephen King

I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.

Quinlan Terry

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

Italo Calvino

By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.

Dan Cruickshank

Anyone who lives in this time is concerned with grottiness.

Peter Reading

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

George Orwell

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

George Steiner

Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

Octavio Paz

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict.

Elizabeth Wilson

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

Edgar Z. Friedenberg

You are born modern, you do not become so.

Jean Baudrillard

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Jean Baudrillard