Quotes about modernity
page 11

“.. the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

In Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008.
1914 - 1916, Pittura e scultura futuriste' Milan, 1914

Cars

“Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything. They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position. They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either. But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly. All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation. Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error! Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth. More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth. Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies. There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth, Lie, Law, Error

“Citizens of a modern society need […] more than that ordinary "common sense" which was defined by Stuart Chase as that which tells you that the world is flat.”

Stuart Chase (1888–1985) American economist

Stuart Chase in S. I. Hayakawa (1949) Language in Thought and Action. p. 29-30

World, Sense

“The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.”

Lew Rockwell (1944) American libertarian author and editor

6 October 1996 "Down With the Presidency" http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/down-presidency.html 1990s

War, People, Lie, School

“The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Generation A (2009)

Life, World, Time

“Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our 'worldliness.”

George Grant (1918–1988) Canadian philosopher

Technology and Justice (Notre Dame: 1986), p. 15

Hunger, War, People, World

“You're talking to a modern, nice, affable German person and they're saying to you something like 'You know, vell, it's a critical time now for Germany within Europe, also globally, economically ve are pretty good, ve have been better. But ve are very vibrant in the theater and arts…' and all the time you'll be listening to this, you're thinking Mmm, yeah, mmm… Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler…”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Art, Thinking, Time, Personality

“Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Law, Parting

“Two understandings of tradition as well as their relation to one another need to be distinguished here. On the one hand, the conservative sense of tradition against which the new or the modern is unfailingly opposed, and, on the other, tradition as the mark of a seriousness in which an essential questioning takes place.”

David Ferris

"Truth Is the Death of Intention: Benjamin's Esoteric History of Romanticism," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 1992, p. 458

Understanding, Question, Sense

“This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

“It is hard to say whether increasing complexity is the cause or the effect of man's effort to cope with his expanding environment. In either case a central feature of the trend has been the development of large and very complex systems which tie together modern society. These systems include abstract or non-physical systems, such as government and the economic system. They also include large physical systems like pipe line and power distribution systems, transportation and electrical communication systems. The growth of these systems has increased the need not only for over-all planning, but also for long-range development of the systems. This need has induced increased interest in the methods by which efficient planning and design can be accomplished in complex situations where no one scientific discipline can account for all the factors. Two similar disciplines which emerged about the time of World War II to cope with these problems are called systems engineering and operations research.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: A methodology for systems engineering, 1962, p. 5: About the evolution of systems engineering; Partly cited in: Allen B. Rosenstein (1965) " Systems engineering and Modern Engineering Design http://books.google.com/books?id=HDp9ReqM314C&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false"

War, World, Communication, Problem

“Because his living presence became such an uncommonly global one, that ministry [Jackson’s individual spiritual concerns] reflected universal ecumenical principles dressed up in ultra-modern dance grooves, love songs to nature, lyrical eulogies in the form of musical elegies, and sermons sung with passionate intensity and suffering eloquence.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from Work and Soul in Michael Jackson’s This Is It).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Michael Jackson

Love, Music, Nature, Suffering

“[BitCoin]'s the greatest scam of modern times. … the poor, the average mom-and-pop, the truck driver and the barber, who put their life savings into this, are going to lose their money, and be told to keep holding on, trust us, the value will go up. And they're gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna lose their life savings. … This is what happened with the dot-com boom, the grandma and grandpa lost their life savings. History is repeating itself. … We have these scamsters, basically, hyping the heck out of it, while all it's being used for is illegal money laundering. … It's simply gonna implode before you know it. And regular people who trust you are gonna lose their shirts. … Would you put your life savings into digital currency? You lose a password and you've lost everything. … They know it's gonna crash and burn. … it crashes and it goes to zero, and people lose their life savings. Don't do it. Get out of it, rather than losing everything you have. Yes, the price might increase, but more likely than not it's gonna be zero before you know it.”

Vivek Wadhwa American academic

Digital Gold or Ponzi Scheme? http://youtube.com/watch?v=mkSw04Guw0E on CNN (6 January 2018, 1045 EST)

Life, Money, People, History

“Every play which is produced—and for that matter, every book that is published, every picture which is exhibited, every film which is turned—is subjected to the Board of Censors… Romantic love in even its purest phases is not thought to be a fitting subject for consideration of citizens of a communist state;... the sex play is unknown in modern Russia… There remains as the ubiquitous theme for plays: revolution, with all the patriotic and nationalistic connotations which have grown up around it; heroism, sacrifice for the nation and class; consciousness of solidarity with one’s fellow proletarians; common suffering; great adventures with new ideas; great prospects for future machine age which is to be a sort of Russian-communist Americanism.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "The New Russia" 1928, pp. 27-28

Love, Books, Age, Sex

“Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that's the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I'm telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don't know…. Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don't understand it. II really don't. I don't know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 91-92

Art, Feeling, Understanding, Problem

“The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i. e., he must be a dialectical materialist.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 227–36.
Collected Works

Nature

“Dialogue in Hell:
Twenty-First Dialogue

Machiavelli: I am afraid that you are somewhat prejudiced against loans;… modern economists today expressly recognize that, far from impoverishing the state, public debts enrich it. Will you allow me to explain how?
Montesquieu:…. I should first of all like to know from whom you will ask so much capital, and for what reason you will ask it.
Machiavelli: For that, foreign wars are a great help. In the great states, they permit the borrowing of five or six hundred millions; one manages so as to spend only half or two-thirds, and the rest finds its place in the treasury for domestic expenditures.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

War, Hell, Help

“All anyone’s got is theories, usually distorted by what they’ve been through or what they want. This book, for example, was written by someone from a suburban, broken home, raised in Thatcher’s Britain, where inclusive ideas and family values were dismantled. A culture in which fame and celebrity became deified and drug use among the young extremely prevalent. Where modern manifestations of tribal identity like trade unions or guilds became redundant, manufacturing industries disappeared, neoliberalism emerged, and the welfare state was all but abolished. You could probably predict the contents of this book by looking at my weekly shopping receipt from Tesco’s. Alright, Waitrose. I’m dying to paint myself as a lowborn, Wat Tyler, Essex messiah; fortunately, I’m not quite that mad. I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Books, Family, Home, Idea

“I think that the idea that a modern society would be able to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible is absurd. One cannot make out of Germany with at least a thousand years of history since Otto I subsequently make a crucible.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

Frankfurter Rundschau, 12. September 1992, S. 8, zitiert in konservativ.de http://www.konservativ.de/epoche/139/epo_139b.htm und linksnet.de http://www.linksnet.de/linkslog/index.php?itemid=431

History, Idea, Thinking

“Maybe I'm just a selfish maniac who is wasting his time trying to transfer feelings which perhaps no one cares about onto a fretboard and a piece of magnetic tape. Maybe it's the modern petroglyph, or the modern way to write on the wall of your cave: "I was here." Maybe it is a cry to God about how much I hate the bad things and how much I love the good things.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

Love, God, Hate, Way

“By contrast, Galileo, the other legendary scientific figure of the era, not only published the most compelling critique of Aristotelian scholasticism in his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, but in the process turned the issue of the epistemic authority of theology versus the epistemic authority of empirical science into a hallmark of modern times. Although Newton clearly sympathized with Galileo, he wrote virtually nothing critical of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy, and the immense effort he devoted to theology was aimed not at challenging its epistemic authority, but largely at putting it on a firmer footing. Newton made no direct contributions to philosophy of a similar magnitude. Indeed, from his extant writings alone Newton has more claim to being a major theologian than a major philosopher.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

Source: The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2002, p. 1

World, Effort, Science, Time

“My use of social media is not Presidential - it's MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Tweet published by @realdonaldtrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881281755017355264 (1 July 2017) 2010s, 2017, July

“The modern writer is too often a Theseus so enamored of the grotesque appearance and strange cavortings of the Minotaur that he has decided to make his permanent abode in the Labyrinth, and to accept the Minotaur's laws as his own.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Law, Appearance

“The long-range trend toward federal regulation, which found its beginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Act of 1890, which was quickened by a large number of measures in the Progressive era, and which has found its consummation in our time, was thus at first the response of a predominantly individualistic public to the uncontrolled and starkly original collectivism of big business. In America the growth of the national state and its regulative power has never been accepted with complacency by any large part of the middle-class public, which has not relaxed its suspicion of authority, and which even now gives repeated evidence of its intense dislike of statism. In our time this growth has been possible only under the stress of great national emergencies, domestic or military, and even then only in the face of continuous resistance from a substantial part of the public. In the Progressive era it was possible only because of widespread and urgent fear of business consolidation and private business authority. Since it has become common in recent years for ideologists of the extreme right to portray the growth of statism as the result of a sinister conspiracy of collectivists inspired by foreign ideologies, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the first important steps toward the modern organization of society were taken by arch-individualists — the tycoons of the Gilded Age — and that the primitive beginning of modern statism was largely the work of men who were trying to save what they could of the eminently native Yankee values of individualism and enterprise.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter VI, part II, p. 233

Men, Age, Fear, Business

“Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions.”

Fritz London (1900–1954) American physicist

[Fritz London, Edmond Bauer, La théorie de l'observation en mécanique quantique, Hermann, Paris, 1939]
Translation by [John Archibald Wheeler, Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983, 0-691-08315-0, 220]

“It looks as if the war in Europe is rapidly moving towards a conclusion. Probably I am wrong about that but I can't see how it can be otherwise. It seems clear that the Allies are outclassed on mechanical equipment, and it is foolish to talk about modernizing their Armies in times like these, they ought to have thought of that five years ago. There is no excuse for them not thinking of that except for the unintelligent, in fact, stupid, narrow-minded and selfish leadership which the democracies of the world are cursed with.
It is all very well as everybody is in the same position, but when some other system develops stronger leadership, works hard and long, and intelligently and aggressively—which are good traits—and, superimposed upon that, develops the instinct of a racketeer, there is nothing for the democracies to do but fold up. And that is about what it looks as if they are going to do.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (June 1940) cited in: David Farber (2003). Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors. p. 225

War, Stupidity, World, Democracy

“Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match. Those cartoon rabbits would have to spend a lot of time slapping their bellies and moaning.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian 15 February 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/charlie-brooker-ebook-convert Guardian columns

Children, Parent, Winter, Time

“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Giles Whittell, " The world according to Richard Dawkins http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4191347.ece" (), The Times, quoted in Trevor Grundy, " Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html" (), The Huffington Post.

People, Way, Childhood, Personality

“For the modernist, in contrast, the past is largely irrelevant. The nation is a modern phenomenon, the product of nationalist ideologies, which themselves are the expression of modern, industrial society. The nationalist is free to use ethnic heritages, but nation-building can proceed without the aid of an ethnic past. Hence, nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

As cited by Eric G.E. Zuelow " Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm" on nationalismproject.org. 1999-2007. Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994)

History, Past

“The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: World Commodities and World Currencies (1944), Chapter III, The Paradox of the Stockpile, p. 23

World

“Mahatma Buddha has also left a deep imprint on my life. In my personal room also, there are three-four statues of the Buddha…. In Buddhism, I see dharma entrenched in karuna (compassion). I believe compassion is the most valuable essence of life. When I formed the government, these values got ingrained even deeper. What attracts me about Buddha is his inclusive philosophy; secondly, his modernity; and thirdly, his belief in the importance of Sangathan—the idea of Sangha. This underlies all his philosophy. I would often wonder how Buddha managed to reach all over the world. What was it about him that lit sparks everywhere he went, took ordinary human beings towards their kartavya (duty) and appealed to the lower status groups as well? Buddhism does not have too much tam-jham or celebration of big utsavs. There is a direct connect of the individual with the Divine. That entire thought system touches me deeply. Moreover, wherever Buddha went, the region witnessed prosperity. Even though China had a different belief system but Buddha has maintained his influence on China as well. Recently, I went to China and found that their government was introducing me to Buddhist elements of their culture with great pride. I got to know that China is making a film on Hiuen-Tsang. I took a pro-active role and wrote to those people saying that they should not forget the part about his stay in Gujarat. Hiuen-Tsang lived for a long time in the village where I was born. He has written about a hostel in that village where 1,000 student monks resided. After I became chief minister, I got the area excavated and found archeological evidence of things described by Hiuen-Tsang. This means Mahatma Buddha’s philosophy would have had some influence on my ancestors.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.388-389
2013

Life, People, World, Idea

“Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe — the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. xix

Teachers, Time, Parting

“His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 255)

Religion, Law, Heart

“As for 'racism', the modern BNP opposes mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the grounds that human biocultural diversity is being exterminated by global capitalism. It demands for every single people and culture on planet Earth the right to self-preservation which it seeks for its own. Such a position is clearly out of step with the extermination-through-assimilation model of multi-culturalism promoted by the dominant ideology of the USA, but it equally clearly has nothing to do with 'hate' or wishing to harm others.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, Civil liberty – the indivisible right.

Hate, People

“The Question of sovereignty is often raised. I am one of those who believe that in a modern world one has to give up a great deal of sovereignty. I am prepared to give up sovereignty to the world, but not to a selected number of European countries. That is not giving up something for world security; it is giving something up to sectional interests.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/nov/08/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (8 November 1962). 1960s

World, Question, Country

“I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know there are some people terrified of the bomb, but there are others terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches that silence terrifies the most.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

As quoted in "Cosmo Listens to Records" http://www.mediafire.com/view/za1l4i1dftotwg9/.png by Nat Hentoff, in Cosmopolitan (November 1965)

People, Silence

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Women, Pain, World, School

“"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played." and "I love Pops" (Louis' nickname) … Louis has been through all kinds of styles. That's good tuba, by the way. You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat — with feeling. That's another phrase for swing. I also love the way he sings.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

In the Jazz Review with Nat Hentoff (1958); also in , and in many other books https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=%22play+anything+on+a+horn%22+miles+davis On Louis Armstrong in a Playboy magazine interview. 1950s

Love, Way, Feeling, Singing

“We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine interest in their researches and their speculations, a public which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, — the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology — only one thing was lacking — popular philosophy.”

Albert Schinz (1870–1943) American writer

Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), p. xv.

Art, Feeling, Democracy, Fashion

“Modern man - although a unity of body, mind, and soul - exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Life, Soul, Change

“In 1964 I was at school, planning to study economics and sociology, when curiosity took me to the Tate Gallery to see an international survey exhibition of contemporary art. It brought together the painting and sculpture of the previous decade, beginning with the late works of the modern masters, Matisse and Picasso, and concluding with the twenty-seven year olds Allen Jones and David Hockney. I was bowled over. Suddenly, art was not just Turner and Constable, or Leonardo and Michelangelo, but objects of considerable size and brilliant colour, dealing with the sensations, subjects and issues of the Sixties.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

School, Art, Study, Painting

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

taken from Adbusters magazine
Other sources

Hate, People, Art, History

“If I were compelled to state in a single sentence the most significant contribution of our movement to modern civilization, I should say that it is the application of the idea of continuous and experimental research, found so effective in economic enterprise, to the business of public administration intimately and in a deep-thrusting sense, a contribution to the processes by which modern mankind is striving with all its resources to emancipate itself from the tyranny of rules of thumb and the blind regimen of nature, becoming conscious of its destiny as an all conquering power.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

As quoted in The Administrative State (1948) by Dwight Waldo, p. 33

Idea, Business, Nature, Sense

“Democracy has failed to dampen the right/left ideological schism, which is historically rooted in the early years of separate state creation. And neither the right nor the left is fully able to provide a convincing alternative vision of how democracy in Korean society can robustly develop and thereby enhance its quality. The rightists/conservatives, who continue to retain their predominant power and influence over the state and civil society, still cling to an old-fashioned, outmoded black-and-white ideology derived from the Cold War period. That ideology can no longer provide a political vision and values and norms pertinent to the post-Cold War era as well as a democratized, highly modernized and globalized social environment. Thereby they have failed to play a leading role in enhancing autonomy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, respecting rule of law, and contributing to bringing social integration and inclusiveness.
On the other hand, the leftists have disappointed many people who expected that the entirely new generations which appeared on the political center stage in the course of democratization could play a decisive role in changing Korean politics. In recent years we have witnessed a growing disillusionment with the radical discourses and ideas as well as with their inability to develop a new type of party politics, deal with the socio-economic problems and provide a certain substantive model for ethical life.”

Choi Jang-jip (1943) South Korean political scientist

"The Fragility of Liberalism and its Political Consequences in Democratized Korea" (2009)

Life, War, People, Law

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Men, God

“The most profound reason… why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence… appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit."”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 421 as cited in: Kenneth Allan (2009) Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. p. 212

Appearance, Personality

“The communications challenge faced by reform movements the world over and illustrated by this incident is this: in the modern communications business, particularly in the case of television, negative is more newsworthy than positive; short term is more newsworthy than long term; disagreement is more newsworthy than agreement; emotion-laden critiques are more newsworthy than well reasoned proposals for constructive change; discord, threats to order, and bad government are much more newsworthy than peace, order, and good government.”

Preston Manning book The New Canada

Source: The New Canada (1992), Chapter Seven, The Vancouver Assembly, p. 137

World, Peace, Communication, Business

“[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Lecture at Mount Holyoke College, August 1944; later published as 'A Tour of the Sublime', in 'Tiger's Eye', 15 Dec. 1948; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory' 1940s

People, Art, Way, Past

“Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XV, Changers In Land Law, p. 237

Law

“Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-tuning originality.”

James Gleick book Genius

James Gleick (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Vintage Books

World, Learning, Universe, Science

“For the Confucian, the specialistic expert could not be raised to truly positive dignity, no mater what his social usefulness. The decisive factor was that the "cultured man" (gentleman) was "not a tool"; that is, in his adjustment to the world and in his self-perfection he was an end unto himself, not a means for any functional end. This core of Confucian ethics rejected professional specialization, modern expert bureaucracy, and special training; above all, it rejected training in economics for the pursuit of profit.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: Religion of China (1915), p. 246

World, Decision, Perfection, Training

“This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion.

In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

World, Education, Religion, Way

“The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologist. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali Phonetics, Bengali Onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earliest of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them.”

Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890–1977) Bengali linguist

S.K. Chatterji (1926) in: S.K. Chatterji. " Visva-manah Vak-pati http://books.google.nl/books?id=9x-Peh32rw8C&pg=PA124" in: Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary. S. Radhakrishnan eds. Sahitya Akademi. 1990. p. 124

Problem, Appearance, Time

“[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

Question, Change, Time

“Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of modern art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Three, The Testimony Of Modern Art, p. 37

Art, Understanding, Suffering

“"True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's Strange Story; "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

Science, Time

“Modern military planners often talk in terms of “threat spirals” when a given threat escalates and inspires a defensive countermeasure. Ideally you should anticipate your opponent’s next escalation and take countermeasures, insulating yourself from the future threat.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 202

Future

“It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Note appended to his poem The End of War (1933)
Literary Quotes

War, Universe

“Luther's Qualifications. Luther had a rare combination of gifts for a Bible translator: familiarity with the original languages, perfect mastery over the vernacular, faith in the revealed word of God, enthusiasm for the gospel, unction of the Holy Spirit. A good translation must be both true and free, faithful and idiomatic, so as to read like an original work. This is the case with Luther's version. Besides, he had already acquired such fame and authority that his version at once commanded universal attention.
His knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was only moderate, but sufficient to enable him to form an independent judgment. What he lacked in scholarship was supplied by his intuitive genius and the help of Melanchthon. In the German tongue he had no rival. He created, as it were, or gave shape and form to the modern High German. He combined the official language of the government with that of the common people. He listened, as he says, to the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops, and, "looked them on the mouth," in pursuit of the most intelligible terms. His genius for poetry and music enabled him to reproduce the rhythm and melody, the parallelism and symmetry, of Hebrew poetry and prose. His crowning qualification was his intuitive insight and spiritual sympathy with the contents of the Bible.
A good translation, he says, requires "a truly devout, faithful, diligent, Christian, learned, experienced, and practiced heart."”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's competence as a Bible translator

Women, Men, God, Children

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way, Quotes, Sleep, Memory

“People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from official website http://www.whynot-world.com

Love, People

“Only a modern systems approach promises to get the full complexity of the interacting phenomena - to see not only the causes acting on the phenomena under study, the possible consequences of the phenomena and the possible mutual interactions of some of these factors, but also to see the total emergent processes as a function of possible positive and/or negative feedbacks mediated by the selective decisions, or "choices," of the individuals and groups directly involved.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 79; As cited in Gregory A. Daneke (1999) Systemic choices: nonlinear dynamics and practical management http://books.google.nl/books?id=q_YbuU52ejUC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82. p. 82.

Decision, Study

“The moderns contended that the concentration on virtue contradicts the concern for well-being. Aristotle admitted that “equipment” as well as virtue is necessary for happiness, but he said nothing about how that equipment is acquired. A careful examination of the acquisition of equipment reveals that virtue impedes that acquisition. Liberality, for example, presupposes money and not caring for it overmuch. But one must care for it to get it. Moreover, spending money exhausts it, so that liberality makes the need for acquisitiveness greater than it would have been without the virtue. Liberality both discourages and encourages acquisitiveness, putting man in contradiction with himself. … The miser is not likely to need to steal. And his quest for profit can, properly channeled, produce benefits for others. In the old system he is given a bad conscience and a bad name. But it would seem that nature is not kind to man, if the two elements of happiness—virtue and equipment—are at tension with one another. Equipment is surely necessary, so why not experiment with doing without virtue? If a substitute for virtue can be found, the inner conflict that renders man’s life so hard could be resolved.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” pp. 282-283.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Money, Happiness, Nature

“In Vienna, Modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. …they questioned what constitutes reality, what lies below the surface appearances of people, objects, and events. …They discovered that …people harbor not only unconscious erotic feelings, but also unconscious aggressive impulses that are directed against themselves as well as against others. Freud later called these dark impulses the death instinct.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Death, People, Feeling, Question

“I reacted to Cézanne almost the same way as you [= Rosalyn Drexler ], the first time I saw him when I was 14... Then I saw my first Cezanne and it jolted me. It was a 'Bathers' [Cézanne painted several of them]. I didn't think he drew well at all. I thought the figures looked stiff and wooden, but I was enthralled by it. I knew there was something there that was going to take me a lifetime to understand. What I took to be the crudity of his technique — that opened a door for me. I began to look at everything differently. That was the year [1932] I discovered Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Soutine — I began to go to the Museum of Modern Art every week. At the same time, I loved New Yorker covers — and El Greco. I didn't mind mixing things up. Nobody was going to tell me what to like or what not to like. Until I was 17 I thought all real artists (I didn't count commercial artists) were dead or foreign with the exceptions of Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, whose work I had seen at 'An American Place.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Love, Art, Way, Understanding

“Modern capitalism has as little use for liberum arbitrium [undisciplined] persons as laborers as it has for the businessman fully without scruples in the running of his company.”

Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism

Personality

“The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God, Hostility, World, Religion

“All that this country can achieve depends on developing our nation as a high growth, vibrant economy. In the modern global economy, even the greatest political ambition is doomed to failure without an economy driving employment, investment, research and development and rewarding success.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Principles and Priorities : Programme for Government (September 5, 2007)

Failure, Success, Dependency, Country

“There're so many young guys, you know — young Americans and, yes, young men everywhere — a whole generation of people younger than me who have grown up feeling inadequate as men because they haven't been able to fight in a war and find out whether they are brave or not. Because it is in an effort to prove this bravery that we fight — in wars or in bars — whereas if a man were truly brave he wouldn't have to be always proving it to himself. So therefore I am forced to consider bravery suspect, and ridiculous, and dangerous. Because if there are enough young men like that who feel strongly enough about it, they can almost bring on a war, even when none of them want it, and are in fact struggling against having one. (And as far as modern war is concerned I am a pacifist. Hell, it isn't even war anymore, as far as that goes. It's an industry, a big business complex.) And it's a ridiculous thing because this bravery myth is something those young men should be able to laugh at. Of course the older men like me, their big brothers, and uncles, and maybe even their fathers, we don't help them any. Even those of us who don't openly brag. Because all the time we are talking about how scared we were in the war, we are implying tacitly that we were brave enough to stay. Whereas in actual fact we stayed because we were afraid of being laughed at, or thrown in jail, or shot, as far as that goes.”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

The Paris Review interview (1958)

Men, War, People, Guy

“Mankind in the technological world is prepared to give up his independence in exchange for all kinds of facilities and in exchange for consumer products and a certain security. In short, in exchange for a package of welfare provisions offered to him by society. As I was thinking about that I couldn't help recalling the story in the Bible about Esau and the lentil broth. Esau, who is hungry, is prepared to give up the blessings and promise of God in exchange for some lentil broth. In the same way, modern people are prepared to give up their independence in exchange for some technological lentils.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

God, People, World, Way

“I don't know much about the score for GODZILLA 1985. However, my impression of GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE is a negative one, both in terms of the direction and the music. For example, the music that is heard while the scenes that take place in Saradia are shown is just ridiculous. The composer used European music instead of some modern Arabic music. By the way, during the production of GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE, Toho asked for permission to use some of my music in the film. I said that I would allow its use as long as it was not turned into popular music. Toho agreed to that, but just before GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE was completed, a Toho representative came to me and said, "Well, your music was turned into popular music." By that time, it was too late to do anything about the situation. After GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE was released, my daughter came to me and said, "No matter how much you try to escape from Godzilla movies, Toho always uses your name and your melodies, so why don't you just score the next Godzilla film yourself?"”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

That is why I agreed to work on GODZILLA VS. GHIDRAH. As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Music, Way, Time, Daughters

“The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies.”

Kevin Spacey (1959) American actor, director and producer

As quoted in The Old Vic, Summer 2011

Jealousy, Way, Motivation, Personality

“To show that this end [of art by its dissolution into real life] is only a beginning, it is essential that.... the series of galleries [of the future museum of modern art] be followed by a room in which painting and sculpture will be realized by the interior itself.... demonstrating that what is lost for art is gained for life. This room could therefore be designed for use as a lecture room, a restaurant.... as a bar with an American jazz band.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian's reaction on a questionnaire (c. 1931?)
Quote of Mondrian, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 166
1930's

Life, Art, Future, Painting

“The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

On Photography

History

“I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

From Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou by Bruno Bosteels, in Alain Badiou: Philosophy And Its Conditions, edited by Gabriel Riera. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. ISBN 0791465047.

Way, Fashion, Time

“Judge: Did you hear that, Mr. Cirroc?
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer: (on cellphone) I'm sorry your honor, I was listening to the magic voices coming out of your modern invention.”

Phil Hartman (1948–1998) Canadian American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist

On Saturday Night Live, More Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer

“The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is… directly contrary to history… [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. …The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man… remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Men, Age, World, Art

“Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape—perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise.”

David Brin book Earth

Part I (p. 48)
Earth (1990)

War, Fashion, Thinking

“The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—
they painted speeding automobiles—
they painted lamps bursting with light—
they painted steaming locomotives and swift bicyclists—
the Futurists stylized their compositions, adopting a violently colored look; with synoptic and geometric shapes they multiplied and decomposed the rhythms of objects and landscapes in order to increase their dynamic qualities and to give an effective rendering of their swift ideas, the states of mind, their conceptions.”

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Italian painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer

Depero (1931) "Futurism and Adverticing Art"; Republished in: Futurism : an anthology http://modernistarchitecture.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ebooksclub-org__futurism__an_anthology__henry_mcbride_series_in_modernism_.pdf. edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, (2011), p. 290

Art, Color, Idea, Light

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

Star, Idea, Light, Fight

“All progress, from primitive savagedom to modern civilisation, will… appear as consisting in the progressive socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of fitness.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

section 11, p. 420
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

Education, Exercises, Appearance

“The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assimilationist project.”

George M. Fredrickson (1934–2008) American professor and historian

2000s, National Identity in France and the United States (2003)

War, Communication, Help

“With very slight straining of equivalents, Thomas might now be written thus:—

By the term God, is meant a Prime Mover which supplies all energy to the universe, and acts directly on man as well as on all other creatures, moving him as a mechanical motor might do; but man, being specially provided with an organism more complex than the organisms of other creatures, enjoys an exceptional capacity for reflex action,— a power of reflexion,— which enables him within certain limits to choose between paths; and this singular capacity is called free choice or free-will. Of course, the reflexion is not choice, and though a man's mind reflected as perfectly as the facets of a lighthouse lantern, it would never reach a choice without an energy which impels it to act. [...]

The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of dynamics as modern as the dynamo.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God, Universe

“I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people called Kings. I say, Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Men, People, Error, Nature

“An independent nation cannot function without its own national language. That English should be replaced by our own language as a patriotic necessity. But so far as University education is concerned at any rate, it appears prudent to delay the change-over until our linguistic consolidation has proceeded further and our own languages have become more adequately equipped with the machinery of modern learning,- encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference books, treatises, text books, and a widely intelligible vocabulary of technical terms of modern science … the most elaborate code of ethical conduct that anyone could draw up cannot go much beyond the simple exhortation of The Upanishad’s Satyam vada, Dharmam cara [speak the truth, act nobly]. These should be the watch-words of our public and private life.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his convocation address at the Sri Venkateshwara University, at Tirupathi, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life, Truth, Books, Education

“Conventional dogmas, even if endowed with the authority of an Aristotle - ancient or modern - must be tested vigorously. If they are found wanting, we need not bother with them. But if they are found to be substantially correct, we may not overlook them.”

Norman Lamm (1927) American rabbi

Seventy faces: articles of faith (2002)

“If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. …It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home.. …it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Love, Life, Peace, Religion

“Jerome never liked me -- preferred my sister who was a little fool excited by modern literature -- all swear-words and scatology -- before it became fashionable.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Jerome's mother
The Pillow Book

Fools, Literature, Fashion, Sister

“Americans are well aware that there has been a revolution. In morals. In manners. In speech. In crime rates. In riots. In violence. In drugs. In sex. In pornography. In politics. In movies. In education. In music. What most of us failed to realize at the moment was how important the music revolution would become. It turned out to be the catalyst for all the rest. It became the prod to promote drugs, the advertiser of sex in the hedonism manner, the mind-conditioner for four-letter gutter speech, and eventually the blatant propaganda funnel for political subversion. It also became the seductive Jezebel for a modern philosophy of no God, of Man as merely a graduate beast of the jungle, of Jesus Christ as a phoney actor--a superstar, of peace and prosperity being possible only under communism, of America as the enemy of the world, of Russia as the hope of the world.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

Preface to Rock 'N' Reality: Mirrors of Rock Music--Its Relationship to Sex, Drugs, Family and Religion (1971)

God, World, Education, Peace

“‘… the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Clearing a Space (2008)

History, Idea, Time

“I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world.”

G. Ledyard Stebbins (1906–2000) American botanist and geneticist

G.Ledyard Stebbins, January 6, 1906-January 19, 2000. Spring 2000, UC Davis Alumni newsletter http://www.dbs.ucdavis.edu/alumni/newsletter/spring00/stebbins.html

People, World, Understanding