Modernism Quotes

A modern man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

Elias Canetti

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

Peggy Noonan

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Matthew Arnold

Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.

Le Corbusier

Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

Gilbert Adair

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

Lewis Mumford

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Guy Debord

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

Terry Eagleton

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Bryan Appleyard

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

Angela Carter

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Salvador Dali

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

Norman Mailer

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

Edmond de Goncourt

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

Max Weber

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

Umberto Eco

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Oscar Wilde

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

Eric Hoffer

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

Robert Hewison

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

Alexander Herzen