Quotes about modernity
page 19

“Many modern poets seem to think that poetry should be sensual. It should not—it should be sensuous.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

On poetry

“Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Du Cubisme (1912)

Art, Painting

“Even after the part with the Ten Commandments, we still have God's self-appointed prophet ordering his army of barbaric thieves to pillage villages, killing every man, woman and child, but ironically some predominantly atheist countries in the modern world have finally achieved that sort of peaceful society [purported to be the product of a land governed under Mosaic law], with high education [and] very low crime, and the greatest threat to that comes from religious fundamentalists.”

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

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

God, World, Education, Peace

“The ethical life… is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society… Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Idle Hands" (p. 127)
Modern Culture (2000)

Life, Youth

“The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Lie, Education, Communication, Loyalty

“Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 1, Leaders and Followers, p. 6

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

People, Disease, School, Food

“Capitalist power … is like one of those horrific modern bullets which do not simply pierce the flesh of the victim but explode inside her into a thousand different fragments. … The concept of fetishism is concerned with the explosion of power inside us, not as something that is distinct from the separation of doing and done (as in the concepts of 'ideology' and 'hegemony'), but as something that is integral to that separation. That separation does not just divide capitalists from workers, but explodes inside us, shaping every aspect of what we do and what we think, transforming every breath of our lives into a moment of class struggle.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Thinking

“Neither a community, nor a race, nor yet a culture, an ethnicity or social class, Islam can and must be regarded as what it claims to be: a religion. Yet, as such, it should behave as a religion. That is to say: develop a theology, some sense of transcendence and a moral structure to advocate and defend a set of beliefs. However, this is precisely what modern Islam is not, perhaps does not want to be. Unable to perform as a religion, modern Islam (in most of its varieties) acts like a political movement. It is obsessed with jihad and martyrdom, Kashmir, Palestine, world conquest, hijab, beards, uniforms and other paraphernalia of totalitarianism. In many mosques, including some in France, God is given no more than a cameo role, as jihadists, suicide bombers, hostage-takers and ISIS-style throat-cutters get top billing.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Stop giving modern Islam a free pass http://nypost.com/2015/01/09/stop-giving-modern-islam-a-free-pass/, New York Post (January 9, 2015). New York Post

God, World, Religion, Communication

“When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty. When all the resources exist to promote social equality, nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation.”

Murray Bookchin book Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), introduction to the First Edition (p. vii of the third edition, 2004)

Women, People

“The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974, text published on the website of The Ayn Rand Institute http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_america_at_war_israeli_arab_conflict

Men, Support, Science, Fight

“Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Les douleurs muettes et stupides sont hors d'usage: on pleure, on récite, on répète, on est si touchée de la mort de son mari, qu'on n'en oublie pas la moindre circonstance.
Aphorism 79
Les Caractères (1688), Des Femmes

Death, Fashion, Forgetting

“Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science - The Endless Frontier (1945), Summary

War, Health, World, Peace

“Its is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

"The Truth about Primitive Life"
The Road to Revolution (2008)

Men, War, World, Family

“The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Sect. 260
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

Freedom, Universe

“Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 3
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Men, Help

“I think we need some new Christmas carols with a more modern approach. Of course, I wouldn’t abandon the religious theme completely. How about “Holy Christ, the Christmas Tree’s on Fire”? Or ”Jesus, Can You Believe It’s Christmas Again?” This ought to get the ball rolling; I’m hoping you people will take it from here.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Source: Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004)

People, Hope, Thinking, Tree

“Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 534

Disease

“[Their] things [works of Die Brücke-artists] must be exhibited. But I think it is incorrect to immortalize them in the document [Almanac] of our modern art (and, this is what our book ought to be) or as a more or less decisive, leading factor. At any rate I am against large reproductions”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

of Die Brücke paintings in The Blaue Reiter Almanac
Quote from his letter to Franz Marc, 2 Febr. 1912, as cited in 'Lankheit 20'; quoted in Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914, Milton A. Cohen, Lexington Books, Sep 14, 2004, p. 71
1910 - 1915

Books, Art, Thinking, Decision

“Debates on the definitions of culture versus barbarism, or on the question of who is civilized and who is modern are best discussed in the light of Islamic doctrine. Quite significantly, this point must be kept in mind, particularly as a matter of concern to individuals of the educated classes of Islamic societies upon whom lies the burden of responsibility and leadership of the Umma.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Reflections of Humanity, (1984), p. 17; Lead paragraph.

Education, Question, Light

“The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil. As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Faith of Puppets (p. 18-9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Truth, World, Religion, Dreams

“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. 'This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Statement in the Wall Street Journal, Salman Rushdie: ‘I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must’ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/01/07/salman-rushdie-i-stand-with-charlie-hebdo-as-we-all-must/ (7 January 2015)

Stupidity, Fear, Religion, Art

“It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself…This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology…Human desires are the steam which makes the soial machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that cast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 75 as quoted in Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism edited by Mark P. Leone, Jocelyn E. Knauf, p.40
Propaganda (1928)

Men, School, Motivation, Understanding

“I have devoted exhaustive study to the Protocols of Zion. In the past objection was always made that they were not suited to present day propaganda. In reading them now I find that we can use them very well. The Protocols of Zion are as modern today as they were when published the first time! At noon I mentioned this to the Führer. He believed the protocols to be absolutely genuine!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

As quoted in The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Will Eisner, (10/2/2005), p.110; and in Survivors Victims and Perpetrators:, Essays on the Nazi Holocaust https://books.google.com/books/about/Survivors_Victims_and_Perpetrators.html?id=Hyg98sfH3CAC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false by Joel E. Dimsdale, p.311. Diary excerpts

Study, Time, Reading, Past

“I think one of the things if you look at minimalism or expressionism, there's various movements in modern composition that I think you can see really natural relations in pop music, so I mean I always look to that in pop music.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 2 - 10.13.08

Music, Nature, Thinking

“I cannot stress too strongly the importance of external controls, both governmental and economic. I do not see how economic enterprises can be operated satisfactorily in a modern economy, capitalist, mixed, socialist or whatever, without some strategic external controls over the firm.”

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

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 4 : From Principles to Problems

“It is clear to me that this [his recent works and ideas on art] is art for the future. Futurism, although it has advanced beyond naturalism, occupies itself too much with human sensations. Cubism – which in its content is still too much concerned with earlier aesthetic products, and thus less rooted in its own time than Futurism – Cubism has taken a giant step in the direction of abstraction, and is in this respect of its own time and of the future. Thus in its content it is not modern, but in its effect it is.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to H. P. Bremmer (Dutch art-critic and buyer of his paintings), Paris 29 January 1914; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 75
1910's

Art, Idea, Nature, Time

“Excessive acreages of unused buildings, commercial and residential were created. The need for such construction, given the space demands of modern business bureaucracy, was believed to be without limit. In later consequence, the solvency of numerous banks, including that of some of the nation's largest and most prestigious institutions, was either fatally impaired or placed in doubt. The lending of both those that failed or were endangered and others was subject, by fear and example to curtailment. The construction industry was severely constrained and its workers left unemployed. A general recession ensued. Any early warning as to what was happening would have been exceptionally ill received, seen as yet another invasion of the benign rule of laissez faire and a specific interference with the market. However in keeping with the exceptions to this rule, there would be eventual salvation in a government bailout of the banks. Insurance of bank deposits — a far from slight contribution to contentment — was permissible, as well as assurance that were a bank large enough, it would not be allowed to fail. A preventive role by government was not allowed; eventual government rescue was highly acceptable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Culture of Contentment

Source: The Culture of Contentment (1992), Ch. 5

Fear, Business

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.”

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

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 409

Life, Religion, Soul, Motivation

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 17 (pp. 192-193)

Hate, People, Age, Law

“No-one in their senses wants nuclear weapons for their own sake, but equally, no responsible prime minister could take the colossal gamble of giving up our nuclear defences while our greatest potential enemy kept their's. Policies which would throw out all American nuclear bases…would wreck NATO and leave us totally isolated from our friends in the United States, and friends they are. No nation in history has ever shouldered a greater burden nor shouldered it more willingly nor more generously than the United States. This Party is pro-American. And we must constantly remind people what the defence policy of the [Labour] Party would mean. Their idea that by giving up our nuclear deterrent, we could somehow escape the result of a nuclear war elsewhere is nonsense, and it is a delusion to assume that conventional weapons are sufficient defence against nuclear attack. And do not let anyone slip into the habit of thinking that conventional war in Europe is some kind of comfortable option. With a huge array of modern weapons held by the Soviet Union, including chemical weapons in large quantities, it would be a cruel and terrible conflict. The truth is that possession of the nuclear deterrent has prevented not only nuclear war but also conventional war and to us, peace is precious beyond price. We are the true peace party.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (12 October 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105763 Second term as Prime Minister

War, People, Truth, Peace

“I am sort of a modern monk. My wife and I have a collection of cabins in the middle of nowhere, and we stay out of everything. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t go to cocktails. We don’t go to movies. We don’t watch TV. I don’t use my energy on other people. I just work and read. I live with myself in front of my white page. Of course, for much of the year I have to travel, speak to journalists, engineers, things like that, and it’s the worst. But from the 15th of June to the 15th of September, I live completely secluded, locked in one of my houses, working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, or making my own biorhythm: work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, for 24 hours, without eating. It’s a little sick. But I’m like Dr. Faust. I signed a contract with the devil to sell my life for creativity.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck answer to the question: "What’s the secret to working so quickly and productively?"
Life’s Work: Philippe Starck (2013)

Life, People, Travel, Sleep

“Except for Marxian theories, nearly all modern theories of the business cycle have essential elements that trace back to Knut Wicksell's turn-of-the-century writings on interest and prices. Austrians, New Classicists, Monetarists, and even Keynesians can legitimately claim a kinship on this basis. Accordingly, the recognition, that both the Austrians and the New Classicists have a Swedish ancestry does not translate into a meaningful claim that the two schools are essentially similar. To the contrary, identifying their particular relationships to Wicksellian ideas, like comparing the two formally similar business-cycle theories themselves, reveals more differences than similarities. … [T]o establish the essential difference between the Austrians and the New Classicists, it needs to be added that the focus of the Austrian theory is on the actual market process that translates the monetary cause into the real phenomena and hence on the institutional setting in which this process plays itself out.The New Classicists deliberately abstract from institutional considerations and specifically deny, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the interest rate plays a significant role in cyclical fluctuations (Lucas 1981, p. 237 151–1). Thus, Wicksell's Interest and Prices is at best only half relevant to EBCT. … Taking the Wicksellian metaphor as their cue, the New Classicists are led away from the pre-eminent Austrian concern about the actual market process that transforms cause into effect and towards the belief that a full specification of the economy's structure, which is possible only in the context of an artificial economy, can shed light on an effect whose nature is fundamentally independent of the cause.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Pages 98–99.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

School, Idea, Business, Nature

“Under his [ Marc Chagall ] sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote in Chagall – a biography, Jackie Wullschlagger, Knopf, Publisher, New York 2008, text from inside-cover
after 1930

Painting

“Among organization theorists general, if not universal agreement obtains that it is proper to view the development of organization theory as divided into three periods. Conventionally, this "history" is regarded as beginning early in this century; and the three periods are customarily are designed by the terms classic, neo-classic and modern… The classical period has its beginning, in the conventional view, with Frederick W. Taylor and Henri Fayol… [and] reaches its high point in the thirties with the work of James Mooney and of the editors and authors of the Paper in the Science of Administration. The neo-classical wave is seen as beginning with the Hawthorne experiments in the late twenties. These experiments challenge the formality and rationality of classical theory with the "discovery"of human relations.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Dwight Waldo (1978), "Organization Theory: Revisiting the Elephant," Public Administration Review, 38 (November/December): p. 589

History, Universe, Science

“The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

as quoted in "'Not the true Republican Party': How the party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz" http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/not_the_true_republican_party_how_the_party_of_lincoln_ended_up_with_ted_cruz/ (29 September 2014), by Elias Isquith, Salon

Books, Law, Hope, History

“This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 1, “The Law of Gravitation,” p. 15: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&t=12m45s

Lie, Hope, Idea, Understanding

“The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Exposing Shallowness http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/demello-dalrymple-2647 (June 2000). New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Tattoo

“In our modern world, mass hunger, economic stagnation, environmental catastrophe, political instability, and terrorism cannot be quarantined within national borders.”

Willy Brandt (1913–1992) German social-democratic politician; Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

Attributed in "World Government—What Are the Obstacles?", Awake! magazine article, 1984, 12/22.

Hunger, World

“We will reflect the country we aspire to govern, and the sound of modern Britain is a complex harmony, not a male voice choir.”

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

Speech aimed at Liberal Democrats: join me in my mission http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/dec/16/conservatives.liberaldemocrats (16 December 2005) 2000s, 2005

Country

“Upheaval after upheaval has reminded up that modern man is traveling along the road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.”

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

1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)

Love, Hate, World, Travel

“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 1

Sense

“The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 68.

Life, Truth, Way, Idea

“There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ‘’the pursuit of happiness'’ is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

On BBC's Woman's Hour (5th October 1965)

Happiness, People, World, Question

“Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies; but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Why Humanity Will Never Master Technology (p. 14)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Communication

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men, Hate, People, Search

“The most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the most original and independent—is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th century BCE. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Pavle Ivić in: Linguistics http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/342418/linguistics#ref411727, britannica.com, 9 April 2013.

Way

“The critical study of the philosophies of the past should lead to the study of modern theories. For these latter, born of the fire of contemporary struggles, are militant and alive.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Philosophy In Retrospect, p. 5.

Study, Past

“A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge. The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd…. Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.”

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

March 26, 1910
India's Rebirth

Search, Knowledge, Success

“The celebrated physicist and mathematician A. M. Ampere coined the word cybernetique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of "Essai sur la philosophic des sciences", 1845, Paris). Ampere's grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and electrical systems. It is thus perhaps ironical that Ampere's word should be borrowed by N. Wiener to name this new science, so important to modern warfare. The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the animal and the Machine," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii. About the origin of the word Cybernetics

Behavior, Communication, Nature, Science

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication, Water

“It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 31

Pleasure, Error, Literature, Reading

“They contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound decidedly modern, or secondary and tertiary.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

On the Vedas, in India, What can it teach us (1882) Lecture IV

Idea, Nature

“Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. …The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher was to… decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life, God, Behavior, Mathematics

“In our modern world, we look unkindly on mistakes and imperfection. But this is far from the samurai ideal. Mistakes are part of the learning process and if you haven't made them then you are, indeed, dangerous because it means you have never learned anything. Mistakes, to a samurai, are the proof of your learning.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from Instruction Manual for the 21st Century Samurai.

World, Learning, Parting

“Modern linguistics has also failed to deal with the Cartesian observations regarding human language in any serious way.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Creative aspect of language use"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

Way

“Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (…) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not.”

Patrick Suppes (1922–2014) philosopher from United States of America

Pragmatism in Physics, in P. Weingartner, G. Schurz & G. Dorn (Eds.), The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky (1998), p. 245, ISSN=1026-9347.

Way, Sport

“.. it was Seurat who first and most successfully established a balance between subject, composition and technique.... the modern world that Seurat wished to paint... I understood his importance as soon as I arrived in Paris [1906]... I chose Seurat as my master for once and for all.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, p. 35; as quoted in: Shannon N. Pritchard, Gino Severini and the symbolist aesthetics of his futurist dance imagery, 1910-1915 https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pritchard_shannon_n_200305_ma.pdf Diss. uga, 2003, p. 12

World, Painting

“It has been fashionable in the twentieth century not only to debunk myth, … but to pretend that that reasonable and educated people could avoid the embarrassment of religion and the risk of metaphysics by sticking close to demonstrable facts and testable hypotheses. However, in the course of reducing our beliefs and hopes to certainties and proofs, we impoverished and deluded ourselves. The modern anti-myth reduced human life to a story without a point, a tale told by an idiot, a process without a purpose, a journey without a goal, an affair without a climax (Godot never comes), an accidental collision of mindless atoms. … We have hardly noticed that economics, technology and politics have become the new myth and metaphysic. We haven’t avoided myth and metaphysics, only created demeaning ones.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 22

Life, People, Education, Religion

“The principal feature of modern capitalism is the domination of monopolist combines of the big capitalists.”

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

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Six

“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno.”

Italo Svevo (1861–1928) Italian writer

James Wood in London Review of Books, January 3, 2002. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n01/wood02_.html. Criticism

Freedom

“Too often in a modern building the work of art is an afterthought – a piece of decoration added to fill a space that is felt to be too empty. Ideally the work of art should be a focus round which the harmony of the whole building revolves – inseparable from the design, structurally coherent and aesthetically essential... He [the sculptor] will want to consider both external proportions and internal space volumes in relation to the size and style of sculpture that might be required – not merely the decorative function of sculpture... I am thinking of the didactic and symbolic functions of sculpture in Gothic architecture, inseparable from the architectural conception itself…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore, as cited by Unesco, International Conference of artists, Venice 1952; typescript, in HMF Library
1940 - 1955

Art, Thinking

“A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion,, and it is both appropriate and necessary that we speak against such oppression.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 5 https://books.google.com/books?id=L1WvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA5. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Women, Religion

“Now, as discord is allowable, and even necessarily opposed to concord, why may not noise, or a seeming jargon, be opposed to fixed sounds and harmonical proportion? Some of the discords in modern music, unknown till this century, are what the ear can but just bear, but have a very good effect as to contrast. The severe laws of preparing and resolving discord, may be too much adhered to for great effect; I am convinced that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it.”

Charles Burney (1726–1814) English music historian

The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) pp. 152-3

Law, Music, Strong

“Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 1

Wisdom, Thinking, Time, Past

“Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 338)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

“Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person was forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 159-160.

Education, School, Universe, Loss

“We now come to a third evil, namely, our very unsatisfactory, not to say ugly, furniture. It may be objected that it does not much matter what may be the exact curve of the legs of the chair a man sits upon, or of the table off which he eats his dinner, provided the said articles of furniture answer their respective uses; but, unfortunately, what we see continually before our eyes is likely, indeed is quite sure, to exercise a very great influence upon our taste, and therefore the question of beautiful versus ugly furniture does become a matter of very great importance. I might easily enlarge upon the enormities, inconveniences, and extravagances of our modern upholsterers, but that has been so fully done in a recent number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that I may well dispense with the task.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Eastop & Gil commented that: Burges held strong views about furniture, and protested at the "enormities, inconveniences, and upholsterers." (1865: 69) He advocated the use of the medieval style, because "not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story" (1865: 71). Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 69: Partly cited in: Dinah Eastop, ‎Kathryn Gill (2012) Upholstery Conservation: Principles and Practice. http://books.google.com/books?id=2gf50OiP8lAC&pg=PA50 p. 47.

Beauty, Exercises, Question, Evil

“There is a revolutionary scientific perspective (stemming) from the General Systems Research movement and (with a) wealth of principles, ideas and insights that have already brought higher degree of scientific order and understanding to many areas as of biology, psychology and some physical sciences… Modern systems research can provide the basic of a framework more capable of doing justice to the complexities and dynamic properties of the socio-cultural system.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii as cited in: cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 7-8.

Justice, Idea, Understanding, Science

“Competition with women is almost always a net loss of honor for a man. Men don't consider competition between men and women to be "apples to apples." I don't think women do either… What does a man have to gain? He shows no courage by entering the ring with a woman. He is expected to win. If he does, his victory is shallow and unsavory. He gains no honor in beating a woman- the idea is offensive even to a modern man's vestigial sense of chivalry.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 75
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women, Men, Idea, Courage

“Statesmen and philosophers repeatedly have warned that some values - freedom, honour, self-respect - are higher than peace or life itself. This may be true. Certainly, very many would hold that the loss of human dignity and self-respect, the chains of enslavement, are too high a price even for peace. But the horrible realities of modern warfare scarcely afford even this fatal choice. There is only suicidal escape, not freedom, in the death and destruction of atomic war. This is mankind's great dilemma. The well-being and the hopes of the peoples of the world can never be served until peace - as well as freedom, honour and self-respect - is secure.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time (1950)

Life, Death, War, People

“Dairying as Instrument of Change Kurien said. True development must be such that it brings the modernization process to the service of our majority, namely the rural poor. It must bring to these people not only the pittance which they need for their humble diet but also the means where by they can act together to obtain for themselves the benefits of modern science and organization and in that process the means whereby they can build for themselves, in every village, a society which is at peace with itself, concerned with its neighbours and able to see a bright for all its children.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 81
Quote, Our Leaders

Children, People, Peace, Science

“There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

“Technologies of the Self,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228

World, Knowledge, Appearance

“Basic Instinct 2 is not good in any rational or defensible way, but not bad in irrational and indefensible ways. I savored the icy abstraction of the modern architecture, which made the people look like they came with the building. I grinned at that absurd phallic skyscraper that really does exist in London. I liked the recklessness of the sex-and-speed sequence that opens the movie (and, curiously, looks to have been shot in Chicago). I could appreciate the plot once I accepted that it was simply jerking my chain. You can wallow in it … Footnote No. 2: My 1-1/2-star rating is like a cold shower, designed to take my mind away from giving it four stars.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/basic-instinct-2-2006 of Basic Instinct 2 (31 March 2006) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

People, Sex, Jerk, Way

“Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?"”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Jim Thompson, 1906 - 1977," in The Los Angeles Times (May 1, 1977), p. X3
Other Topics

Money, Age, Drink, Suicide

“Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in Music in History : The Evolution of an Art (1957) by Howard Decker McKinney and William Robert Anderson, p. 640
As quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 69
Variant: The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

Music, Time, Victory

“Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

A coup sûr, cet homme, tel que je l'ai dépeint, ce solitaire doué d'une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d'hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire. IV: "La modernité" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Modernit%C3%A9 Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Men, Pleasure, Imagination, Idea

“If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw, "What Would Keynes Have Done?" in New York Times (November 28, 2008).
2000s -

Way, Understanding, Problem

“Modern war has occurred primarily in the Western culture. Western culture is short-tempered in a sense, always resorting to showdowns with weapons. It originated in the cold North with hunters who killed to eat and then moved on. The tradition of Vikings and pirates is strong in Western culture, and when Western culture moves into a new territory it is accompanied by rifles and guns. You don't like to hear this because you are Westerners, but someone must wake you up.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

New Morning of Glory (1978-01-22 http://www.unification.net/1978/780122.html)

War, Sense, Strong

“Science has led to a multitude of results that affect men's lives. Some of these results are embodied in mere conveniences of a relatively trivial sort. Many of them, based on science and developed through technology, are essential to the machinery of modern life. Many other results, especially those associated with the biological and medical sciences, are of unquestioned benefit and comfort. Certain aspects of science have profoundly influenced men's ideas and even their ideals. Still other aspects of science are thoroughly awesome.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

Source: Science and Complexity, 1948, p. 536

Life, Men, Idea, Science

“Segregating science and spirituality has been the greatest crime against humanity in the past century. These two main branches of knowledge that should have gone hand in hand were divided and practitioners were either labeled as modern scientists or representatives of religious faiths. “Only scientific discoveries apply to logic and intelligence. They are the only truth. Religious faith is blind and misguided.” This was the ideology that was popularized. All the recent natural disasters and the alarming changes in the global climate are challenging the further survival of this beautiful earth we live in. Now, many people cannot help thinking that all this may be the result of weighing science and spirituality on opposite sides of a scale and deeming that one is much greater than the other.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

People, Truth, Faith, Beauty

“If movement conservatism is less about hating the state than about fighting Godless modernism, this might explain why conservatives have always found actual or cultural wars to fight, but have never got around to shrinking or controlling the growth of government (though centrists like Eisenhower and Clinton did).”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Conservatism Turned Upside Down: Sam Tanenhaus' Critique of Conservative Reason (2009)

Hate, War, Fight

“Unless there is a decentralisation of power, in the financial markets and in politics, then there can be no negotiations that can transform the present system of domination. Domination by the rich of the poor, by the educated of the uneducated, by the City of the country. Perhaps a simpler but more controversial way of putting it is that the German economy, with workers on the boards, regional banks, vocational labour market entry and co-determined pension funds has proved to be more capable of producing goods than ours. Their system is based upon subsidiarity and vocation, the cornerstones of the Christian inheritance. Secular modernity is not working. It is inappropriate for our times. Here’s a new paradox: Modernity is out of date.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, Tackling Poverty Together http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/11/24/tackling-poverty-together/

Education, Way, Time, Country

“My motto is, 'What's the hurry?' I'm trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Interview with Corey Levitan for Rolling Stone Online on 2 December 1999.

World, Thinking

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

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

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Wisdom, God

“Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

Life, Law, Decision

“Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.”

William Shatner book Up Till Now

William Shatner and David Fisher "Up Till Now: The Autobiography" https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429937971, pg. 136.

Pain, People, Feeling

“The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles... If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from 'Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life', in 'Kunstblatt', Berlin 1923; as quoted in The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, pp. 24-25
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Beauty, Art, Color

“The modern state is the distinctive product of a unique civilization. But it is a product which is still in the making, and a part of the process is a struggle between old and new principles of social order.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter I, Before Liberalism, p. 9.

Parting

“Contemporary institutional theorizing in the field of organizations dates back thirty-odd years. This particularly describes what are called new or neo-institutionalisms. These terms evoke contrasts with earlier theories of the embeddedness of organizations in social and cultural contexts, now retrospectively called the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). They went through a period of inattention, so that when institutional thinking came back in force after the 1960s, it seemed quite new.
Institutional theories, as they emerged in the 1970s, received much attention in the field, along with other lines of thought emphasizing the dependence of modern organizations on their environments. Perhaps surprisingly, they continue to receive attention, and seem to retain substantial measures of vigor.”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Source: "Reflections on institutional theories of organization,." 2008, p. 790

Thinking, Dependency

“What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N. S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.”

Martin Heidegger book Introduction to Metaphysics

Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) — a publication of lectures of 1935.

Truth, Fish, Sea

“From society's standpoint, modern science and technology appears Janus-faced : It has given us wealth in one sense, and poverty in another; it has harnessed nature to man's basic needs in ways and to extents undreamed - of only a few decades ago, but it has fostered a continuingly lowered "quality of life."”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Source: Organizational cybernetics and human values (1969), p. 7

Life, Way, Nature, Sense

“To a lesser degree, a secret ressentiment underlies every way of thinking which attributes creative power to mere negation and criticism. Thus modern philosophy is deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by ressentiment. I am referring to the view that the “true” and the “given” is not that which is self-evident, but rather that which is “indubitable” or “incontestable,” which can be maintained against doubt and criticism.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 67

Secret, Way, Thinking

“In physical science and in industrial technique… we have emancipated ourselves… from the savage dependence upon catastrophes for progress… In science and in industry we are radicals—radicals relying on a tested method. But in matters of social organization we retain a large part of the conservatism characteristic of the savage mind…
The 'social reformer' we have always with us, it is true. Or rather most of us are 'social reformers' of some kind… Yet the story of the past in matters of social organization is not a story that we should like to have continued for a thousand and one years. Reform by agitation or class struggle is a jerky way of moving forward, uncomfortable and wasteful of energy. Are we not intelligent enough to devise a steadier and a more certain method of progress? Most certainly, we could not keep social organization what it is even if we wanted to. We are not emerging from the hazards of war into a safe world. On the contrary, the world is a very dangerous place for a society framed as ours is, and I for one am glad of it.
Taking us all together as one people in a group of mighty peoples, our first and foremost concern is to develop some way of carrying on the infinitely complicated processes of modern industry and interchange day by day, despite all tedium and fatigue, and yet to keep ourselves interested in our work and contented with the division of the product…
What is lacking to achieve that end… is not so much good will as it is knowledge—above all, knowledge of human behavior. Our best hope for the future lies in the extension to social organization of the methods that we already employ in our most progressive fields of effort. In science and in industry… we do not wait for catastrophes to force new ways upon us… We rely, and with success, upon quantitative analysis to point the way; and we advance because we are constantly improving and applying such analysis. While I think that the development of social science offers more hope for solving our social problems than any other line of endeavor, I do not claim that these sciences in their present state are very serviceable.
They are immature, speculative, filled with controversies. Nor have we any certain assurance that they will ever grow into robust manhood, no matter what care we lavish upon them…. Those of us who are concerned with the social sciences… are engaged in an uncertain enterprise; perhaps we shall win no great treasures for mankind. But certainly it is our task to work out this lead with all the intelligence and the energy we possess until its richness or sterility be demonstrated.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

Source: "Statistics and Government," 1919, pp. 45, 47, 48-51; as cited in: Arthur F. Burns. " New Facts on Business Cycles http://www.nber.org/chapters/c0386," in: Arthur F. Burns (ed). The Frontiers of Economic Knowledge. Princeton University Press. 1954. p. 61 - 106; p. 63

War, People, World, Hope

“In its glorification of the spirit of order, the Church seemed to be giving its sanction to the type of bourgeois who was concerned to fulfill his duties scrupulously and content to remain within his own sphere. But this bourgeois, whom modern eighteenth-century society certainly could not dispense with, was far from summing up in himself the whole spirit of his class. There was another type of bourgeois who had nothing about him of a monk transplanted into an office. He was energetic, pushing, by no means content to confine himself to a life rhythmically punctuated by work; rather, he was concerned to grow, to achieve power and wealth through his own effort. But what would the Church say of this bourgeois who was to become the monarch of the modern age? It did not like him; it could not like him; the impulse that moved him was too contrary to its own. He seemed intent on flouting God; trusting in his own strength, he seemed to want to organize his life independently of the plans of Divine Providence.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 177

Life, God, Age, Effort

“The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"The Psychology of Modern Leftism", item 9
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Feeling