Quotes of Modernism - somelinesforyou

“ Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out. ”

- Robert Hewison

“ 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

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

- Elizabeth Wilson

“ One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be. ”

- Wallace Stevens

“ 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

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

- Bryan Appleyard

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

- Eric Hoffer

“ 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 and Jules De Goncourt

“ 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

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

- Le Corbusier

“ 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

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

- Angela Carter

“ 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

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

- William Shakespeare

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

- Edgar Z. Friedenberg

“ 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… ”

- Umberto Eco

“ 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… ”

- Gilbert Adair

“ 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

“ 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

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

- Terry Eagleton

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

- George Steiner

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

- Charles Baudelaire

“ You are born modern, you do not become so. ”

- Jean Baudrillard

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

- Peggy Noonan

“ Anyone who lives in this time is concerned with grottiness. ”

- Peter Reading

“ 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

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

- Oscar Wilde

“ Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present. ”

- John Berger

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

- Salvador Dali

“ Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art. ”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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