Quotes about modernity
page 13

“Music, for me, is a love bewitched. / Fame as a painter? / Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. / So I have no calling, and loaf.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1899), # 67, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Love, Music

“Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F. D. R. is not surprising.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

As quoted in Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1991), by John Toland, also quoted in "Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II (1995) by Jacob G. Hornberger http://www.fff.org/freedom/0795a.asp

Fear

“Under the old type of capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the exporter of capital has become the typical feature.”

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

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Four, "The Export of Capital"

“As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations. His thinking was truly systematic only when it dealt with achieving the reality of the art object as a "creation out of nothing," which was a common theme in New York art after the last war and the break with the European past.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 58, "Newman: Meaning in Abstract Art II" : On Barnett Newman

War, Art, Thinking, Reality

“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

"Removal" (July 1938)
One Man's Meat (1942)

World, Peace

“Here is the basis of the modern critical biblical science, which treats the documents of Christianity and Judaism according to the same principles of historical investigation which are valid in all other historical domains, particularly in that of the history of the ethnic religions.
The attempt has been crowned with brilliant success. Everywhere, where formerly miracles and oracles, the activity of supernatural persons, and the appearance on the scene of supernatural beings were thought to be discerned, there shows itself now a constant succession of events that are natural, i. e. in accord with the universal laws of human experience. The prophets appear no longer as media of supernatural oracles, but as men whose works and words are perfectly explicable from the character regarded in connection with the conditions of their age and environment. They stand, indeed, in a certain respect above their contemporaries, so far as they contest the modes of thought and action of the latter, and hold before them higher ideals of purer piety and morality; yet these ideals were not communicated to them from without by supernatural revelation, but sprang from their own spirit as products of an especially powerful and happy religious-moral nature, which, under the influence of historical relations, had been so developed that they saw clearly what was perverted in the mode of thought of others, and gave to the better a potent expression.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), pp. 10-11.

Men, Happiness, Age, Religion

“There will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of science as they now do to burning at the stake in the name of religion.”

Henry Jacob Bigelow (1818–1890) American surgeon

Source: Surgical Anaesthesia (1894), p. 370

World, Religion, Science, Time

“Modern football is akin to a turbulent sea. Changes come fast and furious. One may be riding the crest of great waves before being engulfed in enormous crescendos of confusion. Sometimes is can be like surfboarding in the South Atlantic. You do the best you can to stay afloat while all the time fully understanding the fact that things can come crashing down around you. If you worry about the consequences you miss the thrill of the ride.”

Damien Richardson (1947) Irish footballer and manager

City Edition, Vol. 22, Issue 1, p. 7.

Understanding, Change, Time, Football

“The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, p. 10.
Of Molecules and Men (1966)

“As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
…Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer, p. 277
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life, Pain, History, Cry

“It may be remarked incidentally that the recognition of the relational character of scientific objects completely eliminates an old metaphysical issue. One of the outstanding problems created by the rise of modern science was due to the fact that scientific definitions and descriptions are framed in terms of which qualities play no part. Qualities were wholly superfluous. As long as the idea persisted (an inheritance from Greek metaphysical science) that the business of knowledge is to penetrate into the inner being of objects, the existence of qualities like colors, sounds, etc., was embarrassing. The usual way of dealing with them is to declare that they are merely subjective, existing only in the consciousness of individual knowers. Given the old idea that the purpose of knowledge (represented at its best in science) is to penetrate into the heart of reality and reveal its "true" nature, the conclusion was a logical one. …The discovery of the nonscientific because of the empirically unverifiable and unnecessary character of absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time gave the final coup de grâce to the traditional idea that solidity, mass, size, etc., are inherent possessions of ultimate individuals.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Color, Way, Idea, Business

“I often wonder if all the people in this country realise the inevitable changes that are coming over the industrial system in England…owing to the peculiar circumstances of my own life, I have seen a great deal of this evolution taking place before my own eyes. I worked for many years in an industrial business, and had under me a large number, or what was then a large number, of men…I was probably working under a system that was already passing. I doubt if its like could have been found in any of the big modern industrial towns of this country, even at that time. It was a place where I knew, and had known from childhood, every man on the ground, a place where I was able to talk with the men not only about the troubles in the works, but troubles at home where strikes and lock-outs were unknown. It was a place where the fathers and grandfathers of the men then working there had worked, and where their sons went automatically into the business. It was also a place where nobody ever "got the sack," and where we had a natural sympathy for those who were less concerned in efficiency than is this generation, and where a number of old gentlemen used to spend their days sitting on the handle of a wheelbarrow, smoking their pipes. Oddly enough, it was not an inefficient community. It was the last survivor of that type of works, and ultimately became swallowed up in one of those great combinations towards which the industries of to-day are tending.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925). 1925

Life, Men, People, Home

“To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today. There seems to be just as much magic thinking in modern thought as in older; only it takes place in other areas.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in Jorn's letter to anthropologist Francis Huxley (1970) - on the magical character of thinking and images
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Way, Understanding, Nature, Thinking

“Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words "conscious" or "consciousness" in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means "consciousness" in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)

Life, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“For many centuries before modern science, and for the first two and a half centuries of modern science, the division of reality into matter and light seemed self-evident. …As long as the separation between the massive and the massless persisted, a unified description of the physical world could not be achieved.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 9.

World, Reality, Light, Science

“I want you to come with me. We'll be tested, and challenged, but we'll never give up. We'll never turn back. So let the message go out from this conference, a modern compassionate Conservatism is right for our times, right for our party — and right for our country. If we go for it, if we seize it, if we fight for it with every ounce of passion, vigour and energy from now until the next election, nothing and no one can stop us.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to Conservative Party Conference http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/oct/04/conservatives2005.conservatives3 (4 October 2005) 2000s, 2005

Passion, Time, Fight, Country

“Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”

Thomas Szasz book The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.

Fate, Problem, Effort, Fight

““The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

People, Jerk, Star, Reality

“There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

Source: The Arrogance of Power (1966), p. 245

Passion

“To say that you care about one group of people more than others is a moral sin in the modern world. It is considered uncivilized- barbaric.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

ibid
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

People, World

“Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoisie. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Letter to The Morning Post (27 July 1928), quoted in Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Papermacs, 1981), p. 134.

Age, World, Beauty, Fashion

“In the nineteenth century, so-called ‘psychics’ were often tested by having to guess the details on a postcard sealed in an envelope. Often they did surprisingly well so i thought it would be worth presenting some modern day non-psychics with the same challenge.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“One can only be staggered by the hubris of modern artists if we compare them, say, to the humble builders of Chartres Cathedral whose names are not even known. The artist ought to be distinguished by selfless devotion to duty; but we forgot about that a long time ago.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 189

Time

“.. the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

War, Peace, Law, Communication

“Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

The Art of the Hoarding (1894)

Life, Beauty

“In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

[The Real Face of Atheism, 2004, 9780801065118, 3293056M, http://books.google.com/books?id=0SD0mYaYz3sC&pg=PA25&dq=%22in+his+book+Modern+Times%22, 25]
2000s

Books, Time

“Tonight Vietnam must hold the center of our attention, but across the world problems and opportunities crowd in on the American Nation. I will discuss them fully in the months to come, and I will follow the five continuing lines of policy that America has followed under its last four Presidents. The first principle is strength. Tonight I can tell you that we are strong enough to keep all of our commitments. We will need expenditures of $58.3 billion for the next fiscal year to maintain this necessary defense might. While special Vietnam expenditures for the next fiscal year are estimated to increase by $5.8 billion, I can tell you that all the other expenditures put together in the entire federal budget will rise this coming year by only $0.6 billion. This is true because of the stringent cost-conscious economy program inaugurated in the Defense Department, and followed by the other departments of government. A second principle of policy is the effort to control, and to reduce, and to ultimately eliminate the modern engines of destruction. We will vigorously pursue existing proposals—and seek new ones—to control arms and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. A third major principle of our foreign policy is to help build those associations of nations which reflect the opportunities and the necessities of the modern world. By strengthening the common defense, by stimulating world commerce, by meeting new hopes, these associations serve the cause of a flourishing world. We will take new steps this year to help strengthen the Alliance for Progress, the unity of Europe, the community of the Atlantic, the regional organizations of developing continents, and that supreme association—the United Nations. We will work to strengthen economic cooperation, to reduce barriers to trade, and to improve international finance.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

World, Hope, Communication, Problem

“The last six years afforded me much time and food for thought. I came to the conclusion that the human race is not divided into two opposing camps of good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so. Here I am not talking of learning in the narrow sense of acquiring an academic education, but of learning as the process of absorbing those lessons of life that enable us to increase peace and happiness in our world. Women in their role as mothers have traditionally assumed the responsibility of teaching children values that will guide them throughout their lives. It is time we were given the full opportunity to use our natural teaching skills to contribute towards building a modern world that can withstand the tremendous challenges of the technological revolution which has in turn brought revolutionary changes in social values.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Life, Women, Happiness, Children

“A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization", 1906, p. 355

Science

“Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. … The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 11

Wisdom, Truth, Question, Knowledge

“The historical importance of the Carracci is extraordinary; the history of the whole of modern ‘church art’ begins with them.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 9. The Baroque of the Catholic Courts

Art, History

“Perhaps the most important single characteristic of modern organizational cybernetics is this: That in addition to concern with the deleterious impacts of rigidly-imposed notions of what constitutes the application of good "principles of organization and management" the organization is viewed as a subsystem of a larger system(s), and as comprised itself of functionally interdependent subsystems.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Source: Organizational cybernetics and human values (1969), p. 14-15

“It has often occurred to my mind in digesting my thoughts on this subject, what a pity it is that this most useful science should be so generally neglected in the modern methods of education; and that preceptors and tutors, both in public and private seminaries of learning, should forget that the forming the manners is more necessary to a finished education than furnishing the minds of youth. Socrates, who made all his philosophy subservient to morality, was of this sentiment: and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy.”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Men, Pain, Youth, Education

“The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "http://www.bethblog.com/" http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

Game, Suffering

“I have always been fascinated with the arts. When I was in Iran in that position I was constantly concerned with promoting our Iranian traditional art but, at the same time, with introducing contemporary and modern art.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Former queen of Iran on assembling Tehran's art collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/queen-iran-art-collection, The Guardian, (August 1, 2012). Interviews

Art, Time

“One reason why people cherish the delusion that they are still free long after they have lost or destroyed the liberties won by their ancestors lies in the boundless vanity of man when acting as mass. The mass in modern times believes it is sovereign. As sovereign it is free.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: Liberty (1930), p. 13

People, Time

“From the earliest days of my pupilage to art I had been instinctively drawn towards the paintings of Turner, Corot, Constable, Bonington, and Watts, with an intense admiration for their manner in viewing, and methods of re-creating, nature upon their canvases; and in later years I had been fascinated by the works of more modern artists, such as La Thangue, George Clausen, Edward Stott, and Robert Meyerheim.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. vii; Preface.

Art, Nature, Painting

“… that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves but — all their neighbours.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 2
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“The exploiting classes need political rule in order to maintain exploitation, i. e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority and against the interests of the vast majority of the people. The exploited classes need political rule in order completely to abolish all exploitation, i. e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the interests of the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners - the landlords and the capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

2.1, "The Eve of The Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

People, Selfishness

“Creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

Science

“It is certain that during the sixteenth century, and the years that preceded and followed it, poisoning was brought to a perfection unknown to modern chemistry, as history itself will prove. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was, at this period, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are now lost.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Il est certain que pendant le seizième siècle, dans les années qui le précédèrent et le suivirent, l'empoisonnement était arrivé à une perfection inconnue à la chimie moderne et que l'histoire a constatée. L'Italie, berceau des sciences modernes, fut, à cette époque, inventrice et maîtresse de ces secrets dont plusieurs se perdirent.
Source: About Catherine de' Medici (1842), Part II: The Ruggieri's Secret, Ch. II: Schemes Against Schemes.

Secret, History, Science, Perfection

“What was uncovered at Sidhpur only to be covered up again was verily the tip of an iceberg which remains submerged in hundreds of histories written by Muslim historians, in Hindu literary sources which are slowly coming to light, in the accounts of foreign travellers who visited India and the neighbouring lands during medieval and modern times, and above all in the reports of the archaeological surveys carried out in all those countries which had been for long the cradles of Hindu culture. No systematic effort has yet been made by scholars to see the iceberg emerge from the dark depths and tell its own story in a simple and straight-forward manner. Rare is the historian or archaeologist who had related this vandalism to the theology of Islam based on the Qur’ãn and the Sunnah of the Prophet. On the contrary, the subject has been politicised by the votaries of Secularism who become hysterical by the very mention of the untold story. Politicians in power have made and are making frantic efforts to suppress every tip of the iceberg which chances to surface in spite, of the conspiracy to keep it out of sight. Some of these politicians are masquerading as academicians and selling far-fetched and fantastic apologies for the havoc caused by Islamic iconoclasm.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Travel, History, Effort, Light

“The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter One, Nature of Political Economy, p. 8

World

“The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring — as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

The Greek Anthology (p. 59)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Spring

“Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven's virtue; yet, in their greater part, they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success — this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book I, ch. 1.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Life, Men, Age, Soul

“The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. … Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss book Disquisitiones Arithmeticae

Problema, numeros primos a compositis dignoscendi, hosque in factores suos primos resolvendi, ad gravissima ac utilissima totius arithmeticae pertinere, et geometrarum tum veterum tum recentiorum industriam ac sagacitatem occupavisse, tam notum est, ut de hac re copiose loqui superfluum foret. … [P]raetereaque scientiae dignitas requirere videtur, ut omnia subsidia ad solutionem problematis tam elegantis ac celebris sedulo excolantur.
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801): Article 329

Wisdom, Problem, Science

“I mentioned the Magna Carta. That’s the foundations of modern law. We will soon be commemorating the 800th anniversary. We won’t be celebrating it – more likely interring what little is left of its bones after the flesh has been picked off by Bush and Obama and their colleagues in Europe.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2010s, 2013, Speech at DW Global Media Forum

Law

“In the Protestant doctrine of the infinite value of the individual soul, on the one hand, and in the assembling together of the brethren in the church congregation, on the other, you have the seed-bed of modern democracy.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 38.
1930

Democracy, Soul

“It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

World, Religion, Nature, Thinking

“Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

22 February 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Life, Beauty, Color, Way

“The Christians mistake an incident for a cause, and honestly imagine that the Bible is the foundation of modern liberty and law. They forget physical conditions, make no account of commerce, care nothing for inventions and discoveries, and ignorantly give the credit to their inspired book.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Books, Law, Imagination, Forgetting

“My music is not modern, it is merely badly played”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. p. 102
Undated

Music

“From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something – from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Polymorphism in Common Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/28cb9d4217fe6dc3 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“During the Arab invasion of Sindh (712 C. E.), Muhammad bin Qasim first attacked Debal, a word derived from Deval meaning temple. It was situated on the sea-coast not far from modern Karachi. It was garrisoned by 4000 Kshatriya soldiers and served by 3000 Brahmans. All males of the age of seventeen and upwards were put to the sword and their women and children were enslaved. “700 beautiful females, who were under the protection of Budh (that is, had taken shelter in the temple), were all captured with their valuable ornaments, and clothes adorned with jewels.” Muhammad despatched one-fifth of the legal spoil to Hajjaj which included seventy-five damsels, the rest four-fifths were distributed among the soldiers. Thereafter whichever places he attacked like Rawar, Sehwan, Dhalila, Brahmanabad and Multan, Hindu soldiers and men with arms were slain, the common people fled, or, if flight was not possible, accepted Islam, or paid the poll tax, or died with their religion. Many women of the higher class immolated themselves in Jauhar, most others became prize of the victors. These women and children were enslaved and converted, and batches of them were dispatched to the Caliph in regular installments.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Chachnama, in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

Women, Men, Children, People

“Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions? The problem is the basically mechanical nature of our left-brain consciousness. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we learn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently. Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals. The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over. For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot. This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind 'wonderfully', and why we forget so quickly.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), p. 344

Cars, Nature, Problem, Learning

“I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War" (1937), edited by Nancy Cunard, reprinted in The Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986), edited by Valentine Cunningham

Happiness, People, Support

“I will propose a Highway Safety Act of 1966 to seek an end to this mounting tragedy. We must also act to prevent the deception of the American consumer—requiring all packages to state clearly and truthfully their contents—all interest and credit charges to be fully revealed—and keeping harmful drugs and cosmetics away from our stores. It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention. We must change to master change. I propose to take steps to modernize and streamline the executive branch, to modernize the relations between city and state and nation. A new Department of Transportation is needed to bring together our transportation activities. The present structure—35 government agencies, spending $5 billion yearly—makes it almost impossible to serve either the growing demands of this great nation or the needs of the industry, or the right of the taxpayer to full efficiency and real frugality. I will propose in addition a program to construct and to flight-test a new supersonic transport airplane that will fly three times the speed of sound—in excess of 2,000 miles per hour. I propose to examine our federal system-the relation between city, state, nation, and the citizens themselves. We need a commission of the most distinguished scholars and men of public affairs to do this job. I will ask them to move on to develop a creative federalism to best use the wonderful diversity of our institutions and our people to solve the problems and to fulfill the dreams of the American people. As the process of election becomes more complex and more costly, we must make it possible for those without personal wealth to enter public life without being obligated to a few large contributors. Therefore, I will submit legislation to revise the present unrealistic restriction on contributions—to prohibit the endless proliferation of committees, bringing local and state committees under the act—to attach strong teeth and severe penalties to the requirement of full disclosure of contributions—and to broaden the participation of the people, through added tax incentives, to stimulate small contributions to the party and to the candidate of their choice.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Men, People, Penalty

“If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Epilogue
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Imagination, Reality, Time, Past

“It is especially easy in our time to forget others, largely because of the conditions in modern society.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 22

Time, Forgetting

“The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Idea

“The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live. So we find ourselves caught in a messed-up world. The problem is with man himself and man's soul. We haven't learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving. And that is the basis of our problem. The real problem is that through our scientific genius we've made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we've failed to make of it a brotherhood.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Rediscovering Lost Values http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/rediscovering_lost_values/, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954) 1950s

Love, World, Soul, Problem

“It is one of the great ironies of our modern 'civilized' era that in most of the places where you don't feel the need to carry a firearm for self defense you can legally do so if you choose. But in most of places where you do indeed justifiably feel the immediate need to carry a gun, they are banned.”

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

http://www.survivalblog.com/2006/10/the_memsahibs_quote_of_the_day_4.html
How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009)

Feeling

“It is our pride that the Great Satan (U. S.) and the head of despotism, corruption and arrogance in modern times considers us as an enemy that should be listed in the terrorism list.”

Hassan Nasrallah (1960) Secretary General of Hezbollah

United Press International. November 4, 2001 Quote, 2001 Source: Camera: Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1158.

Time

“Of all of the many mysteries of modern astronomy, none is more vexing than the nature of dark matter… This dark matter has eluded every effort by astronomers and physicists to bring it out of the shadows. A handful of us suspect that it might not really exist, and others are beginning to consider this possibility seriously.”

Mordehai Milgrom (1946) Israeli physicist

"Does Dark Matter Really Exist?" 2002

Nature, Effort

“The modern diet is not slightly deficient in just a handful of micronutrients; it is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived, immunity-building compounds. These are not optional; you can't have a lifetime of good health without them.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Super Immunity https://books.google.it/books?id=a9-QeXEmN9EC&pg=PT0 (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), Ch. 1.

Health

“Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"Class Struggle on the Desktop"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Money, Hate, Hostility, People

“We now face the culmination of a long campaign in the courts and in the halls of various governmental bodies, and in the press, to remove the laws against homosexuality from the statute books, and to permit any such relationship between consenting adults. Part of this is a new, anti-Biblical interpretation of this perversion. The facts are read in evolutionary framework, and so we are told it is a form of immaturity. Again, others read it as environmentally determined, so that the pervert is simply reflecting his environmental conditioning. Again there are others who say it is simply a fight for masculinity in a difficult world. All these and the other variations on the modern interpretation, share in common an environmental and an evolutionary approach. There are those in fact who claim that it is a basic component of all people, so that all of us have some aspect of every perversion in us.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

People, Books, World, Law

“The concept of intersectionality was first developed by Black feminists, not postmodernists. Black feminism has a long and complex history, based on the recognition that the system of chattel slavery and, since then, modern racism and racial segregation have caused Black women to suffer in ways that are never experienced by white women.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Way, History, Suffering

“You won’t find solutions to rural India’s health issues in modern facilities that are far removed. Effective strategies will emerge only when you work with the people.”

Abhay Bang

Abhay Bang (2010) " Dr. Abhay Bang: Research with the People http://forbesindia.com/article/ideas-to-change-the-world/dr-abhay-bang-research-with-the-people/13742/1" on forbesindia.com, June 2, 2010.

People, Health

“Once again I talked with some painters, but the modern artists [in The Netherlands ] write more than they paint. If you write about art in such a way and you want to paint always with a fixed plan, then you will lose completely the deep, glorious and spontaneous art. You always have to create the new from the very deep, inside.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:) Ich habe wieder einige Maler gesprochen, aber die Modernen [in Nederland] schreiben mehr als sie malen. Wenn man so über Kunst schreibt und immer so mit einem festen Plan malen will, dan verliert man ganz und gar die tiefe, herrliche, spontane Kunst. Man muss so ganz tief heraus immer Neuses schaffen.
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 23 July 1915; the 'Sturm'-Archive, Berlin
very probably Jacoba is refering here to the Dutch Stijl-artists, as Piet Mondrian and Theo v. Doesburg
1910's

Art, Way, Painting

“The first-century church in Jerusalem clearly had it. And they didn't have any fancy accoutrements. So it can't possibly be stained-glass windows, hand-carved cherubs, custom silk tapestries, gold-inlaid hymnals, thousand-pipe organs, marble floors, mile-high steeples, hand-painted ceilings, mahogany pews, giant cast-iron bells, and a three-piece, thousand dollar suit. It doesn't stick any better to a young, hip, shaved-headed pastor with rimmed glasses, a goatee, and tattoos than it does to an older, stately gentleman in a robe. Nor is it spotlights and lasers, video production, satellite dishes, fog machines, shiny gauze backdrops, four-color glossy brochures, sexy billboards, loud "contemporary" music, free donuts, coffee shops, hip bookstores, break dancing or acrobatics, sermon series named after television shows, a retro-modern matching chair and table onstage, or blue jeans and Heelys. It is not being on television, being on the Internet, or being on book and magazine covers. It is real. It is genuine.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

Books, Music, Color, Coffee

“But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement … There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Justice, Food, Nature, Loss

“The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, field or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Aerts, D. (1998). " The entity and modern physics: the creation-discovery view of reality. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aerts/publications/1998EntModPhys.pdf" In E. Castellani (Ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics (pp. 223-257). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Behavior, Nature

“In actual history, events overlap; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925, p. 41

Age, History

“Modern life is very difficult for people who are unprepared. But this new environment will eventually facilitate more realistic relationships between people.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

Life, People

“[about magazines school children sell, which his wife buys without even looking at what she's buying]
We get a magazine called Modern Ferret. It's a magazine about that hairy rat, I swear to God! And if you ever see it, pick it up. On the inside cover, it's a woman and a man, who publish this magazine, and they wrote this inscription: "Someday, we hope to make money doing what we love, playing with our ferret." Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Pee-Wee Herman lose a lot of money playing with his ferret?”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography (2002)

Love, Money, God, Children

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Drawing, Personality

“We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Truth, Knowledge, Thinking, Appearance

“Even though leading scholars … recognize that Paul's letters were not theological treatises, they still construct Pauline Christianity as if it were an already existing definable religion. And apparently because religion in the modern West is separate from political and economic affairs—indeed, more or less subject to an agreement not to conflict with political and economic affairs—scholarly constructions often simply ignore (or avoid) implications in the sources of engagement with political-economic affairs, particularly any implications of conflict with the dominant political-economic order.”

Richard A. Horsley (1939) Biblical scholar

"Paul's assembly in Corinth: an alternative society," in Urban Religion in Corinth (Harvard: 2005), pp. 374-375.

Religion

“I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People, Age, Thinking, Fight

“Apart from this older generation, there is scarcely a modern mathematician who still adheres without reservation to the classical theory of probability. The majority have more or less accepted the frequency definition.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Third Lecture, Critical Discussion of the Foundations of Probability, p. 81
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

“[something like] a badly constructed or repaired motor, or like that wonderful event of Tinguely's, where he made a huge contraption in the backyard of the Museum of Modern Art called 'Homage to New York', which was a machine that destroyed itself in various humorous ways. It's that breakdown system along with slippages that you can't predict I find most interesting, not because I want to make a point about society as being a broken down system or that all life is entropic — I don't, but rather that its process is unforeseeable.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In an interview with Robert C. Morgan, 1991; in the 'Journal of Contemporary Art, 4', no. 2, p. 56-69
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MqsWqBX4wQ

Life, Art, Way

“One must be absolutely modern.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Il faut être absolument moderne. Une Saison en Enfer http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Season.html (A Season in Hell) (1873)

“Organizations play a leading role in our modern world. Their presence affects - some would insist that the proper term us infects - virtually every sector of contemporary social life. This book is about organizations – what they are and what they do, how they have changed, and how people have thought about them and studied them.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and organizing, 2007, p. 1

Life, People, Books, World

“In the whole of recorded modern history, this was, I believe, the one occasion when one man, with one soaring imagination, with one fire burning in him, and with one unrivalled capacity for conveying it to others, won a crucial victory not only for the forces (for there were many heroes in those days) but for the very spirit of human freedom. And so, on this great day, we thank him, and we thank God for him.”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

Second Term as Prime Minister (1949-1966)

God, Imagination, History, Freedom

“The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1936)

Family, Democracy, Home

“Because intelligent choices of public policies require both technical understanding and sensitivity to the values involved, in modern democratic countries a form of specialized intellectual activity has evolved that tends to combine both aspects of policy.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 3 : Democracy and Markets

Intelligence, Understanding, Country

“That's the offence of the Christian schools; they are exercising government. That's the offence of every Christian who moves out and applies the word of God to anything; he's exercising government. And this the Romans would not tolerate nor will the modern state.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dominion (n. d.)

God, School, Exercises

“The vegetarian movement is an ancient movement and is not quite a modern one.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967

“The spread-the-work schemes, in brief, rest on the same sort of illusion that we have been considering. The people who support such schemes think only of the employment they would provide for particular persons or groups; they do not stop to consider what their whole effect would be on everybody.The spread-the-work schemes rest also, as we began by pointing out, on the false assumption that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done. There could be no greater fallacy. There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied. In a modern exchange economy, the most work will be done when prices, costs, and wages are in the best relations to each other.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), Spread-the-Work Schemes (ch. 8)

People, Support, Thinking, Personality

“Kalidasa, the immortal poet and playwright, is a peerless genius whose works have won world-wide fame. The matchless qualities of his work have been lavishly praised both by the ancient Indian critics and modern scholars. (…) In modern times the translations of Kalidasa's works in numerous Indian and foreign languages have spread his fame all over the world and now he ranks among the few topmost poets and playwrights of the world.”

Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian

Kālidāsa: His Art and Culture by Ram Gopal (1984)

World, Time

“Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)

Life, Men, People, Peace

“For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"Niccolo Machiavelli" (1987)

Faith, Understanding, Country

“The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts. He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.”

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

Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1938)
Literary Quotes

Feeling, Mood, Freedom

“We have seen how types of organization, of law, and of consciousness come together into more comprehensive wholes, the forms of social life. These forms of social life, exemplified in my essay by tribal, liberal, and aristocratic society and then again by the varieties of modernity, are the most general types available to social theory. Each of them represents a unique interpretation of what it means to be human. Each confronts its individual members with the recurring demands of human existence, but each presents these in a special way and limits the resources of matter and thought thst can be used to meet them. Perhaps the most pervasive of these continuing problems have to do with the antagonism between the requirements of human individuality and of human sociability, and with the attempt either to subordinate one to the other or to reconcile the two.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 259-260

Life, Law, Way, Problem

“According to Lewis, the dehumanization threatened by the mastery of nature has, at its deepest cause, less the emerging biotechnologies that might directly denature bodies and flatten souls, and more the underlying value-neutral, soulless, and heartless accounts that science proffers of living nature and of man. By expunging from its account of life any notion of soul, aspiration, and purpose, and by setting itself against the evidence of our lived experience, modern biology ultimately undermines our self-understanding as creatures of freedom and dignity, as well as our inherited teachings regarding how to live — teachings linked to philosophical anthropologies that science has now seemingly dethroned.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life, Soul, Understanding, Nature

“Like it or not, the modern marvel that was South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the handiwork of the black nationalist movement now dismantling it; but the creation of those persecuted, pale, patriarchal Protestants.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Erasing The Afrikaner Nation," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=58 WorldNetDaily.com, November 23, 2007. 2000s, 2007

“Allowing, therefore, the great usefulness of the Government Schools, the Exhibitions, and the Museums both public and private, the question now arises as to what are the impediments to our future progress. The principal ones appear to me to be three.
# A want of a distinctive architecture, which is fatal to art generally.
# The want of a good costume, which is fatal to colour; and
# The want of a sufficient teaching of the figure, which is fatal to art in detail.
It will perhaps be as well to take these one by one.
The most fatal impediment of the three is undeniably the want of a distinctive architecture in the nineteenth century. Architecture is commonly called the mother of all the other arts, and these latter are all more or less affected by it in their details. In almost every age of the world except our own only one style of architecture has been in use, and consequently only one set of details. The designer had accordingly to master, 1. the figure, and the great principles of ornament; 2. those details of the architecture then practised which were necessary to his trade; and 3. the technical processes. Now what is the case in the present day? If we take a walk in the streets of London we may see at least half-a-dozen sorts of architecture, all with different details; and if we go to a museum we shall find specimens of the furniture, jewellery, &c., of these said different styles all beautifully classed and labelled. The student, instead of confining himself to one style as in former times, is expected to be master of all these said half-dozen, which is just as reasonable as asking him to write half-a-dozen poems in half-a-dozen languages, carefully preserving the idiomatic peculiarities of each. This we all know to be an impossibility, and the end is that our student, instead of thoroughly applying the principles of ornament to one style, is so bewildered by having the half-dozen on his hands, that he ends by knowing none of them as he ought to do. This is the case in almost every trade; and until the question of style gets gets settled, it is utterly hopeless to think about any great improvement in modern art.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 8-9; Partly cited in: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol. 99. 1951. p. 520

Age, World, School, Art

Quotes about modernity page 13

Quotes about modernity
page 13