“Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.”

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- Disavowal of transcendence, p. 83 -->
Context: As a result of letting the drive for power dominate existence, man is bound to lose his sense for nature's otherness. Nature becomes a utensil, an object to be used. The world ceases to be that which is and becomes that which is available.
It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood. Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, man’s consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator. He has enclosed himself in the availability of things, with the shutters down and no sight of what is beyond availability.

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.

This quote is itself quoting Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman in the film Grey Owl (1999)
Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Ten Little Indians (2003)

Footnote: It is because of his brain that he has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above.
The Modern Man
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Variant: Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

p. 15 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=yale.39002032470974;view=1up;seq=31 <br class="br">English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century (1906)

Part III: Ragenomics, page 87.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: Under Reagan, corporations transformed from provider's of stability for employees and their families to fear-juiced stress engines. Reagan's legacy to America and modern man is not victory in the Cold War, where he simply got lucky; it is instead one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of "making America competitive" and "unleashing the creative energies of the American worker".