Quotes about modernity
page 7

“Ancient philosophy will always hold its own among those who are worthy to judge it, because it forms… a system that is solid and well articulated like the body, whereas all these scattered members of modern philosophy form no system.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

“My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks by the President to the Diet, Tokyo, Japan. (February 18, 2002) http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/press/release/2002/0902-gwbjapan1.html 2000s, 2002

Peace, Time

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Error, Soul, History, Idea

“Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is "Man is the measure of all things." And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility… If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs', then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead, the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger than a cat.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 17
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Age, Family, History

“The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reports that there are 250,000,000 privately-owned guns of all kinds in America. The firearms industry says that there are three times that number — three quarters of a billion guns — 'of modern design in good working order'. Americans are better heeled than most foreign armies.
And that's exactly the way it should be.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Tastes Like Chicken" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle563-20100328-02.html 28 March 2010.

Alcohol, Way, Time

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

Imagination, Literature, Reading

“[I]t's not by chance that Russia and the U. S. forge alliances in the most critical moments of modern history. That was the case in WWI and WWII. Even if there was fierce confrontation, our countries united against a common threat, which means there's something that unites us. There must be some fundamental interest which brings us together. That's something we need to focus on first. We need to be aware of our differences but focus on a positive agenda that can improve our cooperation.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33oIF-ggK5U 2011 - 2015

History, Chance, Country

“An art mode, new or old, is for the creative mind essentially a point of beginning. Content is brought into being by the activity through which the artist translates the movement into himself. In such an appropriation, there is no difference between an ongoing movement and one that is finished. During the reign of Minimalism, a painter might realize the new through Impressionism. That art history has a schedule of continuous advances en masse is a fantasy of the historian. The shared syntax of art movements is constantly replaced by the sensibility and practice of individuals. The avant-garde art of yesterday is the only modern equivalent of an aesthetic tradition. The fading of the ideas of a movement does not mean that it can no longer be a stimulus to creation. At the very dawn of a movement, the work of its artists commences to replace the concept; instead of Cubism there appear Picasso, Braque, Gris. Compared to the activities to which they give rise, ideas in art have a brief life. In the last analysis, the vitality of art in our time depends on works produced by movements after they have died.”

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

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 230, Art on the Edge (1975) "Shall These Bones Live?: Art Movement Ghosts"

Life, Art, History, Idea

“Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea … can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin; s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Religion, Idea, Thinking

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“Progress in these policies can only be brought about if a considerable degree of consensus exists within our country. I have heard some doubt expressed as to what consensus means…Consensus means deliberately setting out to achieve the widest possible measure of agreement about our national policies, in this particular case about our economic activities, in the pursuit of a better standard of living for our people and a happier and more prosperous country. If there be any doubt about the desirability of working towards such a consensus let us recognize that every successful industrialized country in the modern world has been working on such a basis.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech to the Federation of Conservative Students in Manchester (6 October 1981), quoted in The Times (7 October 1981), p. 6. Margaret Thatcher had read Heath's advance text and responded http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104712 by saying that "To me consensus seems to be—the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects". Post-Prime Ministerial

People, World, Success, Country

“What is modernity? Is it defending foreign interests, or defending interests of our country?”

Itamar Franco (1930–2011) Brazilian politician

Online text Inheritor of Tarnished Presidency: Itamar Augusto Cantiero Franco http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/30/world/man-in-the-news-inheritor-of-tarnished-presidency-itamar-augusto-cantiero-franco.html (December 30, 1992)

Country

“I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, 'Maybe I can find something different… maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.”

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist

Pierre Schaeffer: an Interview with the Pioneer of Musique Concrete (Records Quarterly magazine, vol. 2, n° 1; 1987)
Interviews

Music

“The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

Men, God, Truth, Law

“Central banks have moved to stimulate spending in the face of this attempt to increase savings by lowering interest rates. They lowered them to the zero lower bound without having much effect; the fall in desired savings was too large. We are in a Keynesian liquidity trap. Central banks have tried to stimulate spending by actively increasing the money supply, raising fears of inflation in many circles. But no inflation has resulted as the cash sits idle in corporate coffers. Even at zero interest rates, business firms are reluctant to spend!
What to do? Many pundits say we must simply endure what they call secular stagnation. This is an unhappy prediction. Much better is the Keynesian insight that this is the perfect time for fiscal policy. In the U. S. again, there are immediate needs to repair roads and bridges, rebuild the energy grid, and modernize other means of travel. Keynesian fiscal policy expansion will benefit the economy in both the short and long run.”

Peter Temin (1937) American economist

Why Keynes is Important Today (2014)

Money, Fear, Travel, Business

“1948 Black Mountain College N. C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 1980's, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art world of Our Time, 1980, pp. 55-56 : Autobiographic notes

Art, Music, Home, Mountain

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

Behavior, Problem, Effort, Science

“There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate, and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life. In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Introduction, p. xviii
Disease-Proof Your Child (2005)

Life, Children, Age, Parent

“The new plastic idea thus correctly represents actual aesthetic relationships. To the modern artist, it is a natural consequence of all the plastic ideas of the past. This is particularly true of painting, which is the art least bound to contingencies. The picture can be a pure reflection of life in its deepest essence.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

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

Life, Art, Idea, Nature

“The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.”

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

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 51, "Inquest into Modernism"

Perfection

“We may predict that the science of which we try to be the humble and devoted servants will in the future life of the nations be an important factor in eliminating maladjustments between fundamental economic sectors and assure a smooth and progressive utilization of resources… One wants men with a knowledge of the characteristic features of the economic and social structure of their country and with a fundamental theoretical knowledge along modern lines.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch, (1946, p. 1), as quoted in: " Ragnar Frisch 1895-1995 https://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/doc/doc_199403.pdf." O. Bjerkholt, 1994. 1940-60s

Life, Men, Knowledge, Science

“The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

As quoted in "Dark Lens on America" in The New York Times Magazine (14 January 1990) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D6113FF937A25752C0A966958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Pain, People, World, Thinking

“Much of philosophy concerns man's search for holistic concepts which will help him see a meaningful pattern in the complexity with which his perceptual world confronts him. What is new is the rapidly growing intensity of the quest, and the modern context of the search. Plato's Republic is from a world quite different from that of Boguslaw's. The New Utopians.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Source: Organizational cybernetics and human values (1969), p. 1

World, Search, Help

“It would be silly, of course, to be either 'for' or 'against' modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

"Modernity on Endless Trial" (1986)

Science

“You can imagine that it is not easy to describe this modern vision of the nature of things in any manner intelligible to those who have not our advantages. There is much in this vision which will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 3, “A Racial Awakening” (pp. 228-229)

Beauty, Way, Confidence, Imagination

“Modern macroeconomics flourished in its pursuit of the secrets of long-run economic growth, but it neglected short-run economic problems. In the long run, prices are flexible, and the growth of the economy is determined by the growth in the ability to supply goods and services. But in the short run prices are not flexible. Growth can be held back because prices are too high and, as a result, demand is too low. Keynes made his name by analyzing short-run problems caused by the stickiness or even rigidity of some important prices. But these Keynesian ideas were abandoned by modern macroeconomics.”

Peter Temin (1937) American economist

Why Keynes is Important Today (2014)

Secret, Idea, Problem

“It may fairly be said that the germs of the modern algebra of linear substitutions and concomitants are to be found in the fifth section of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae; and inversely, every advance in the algebraic theory of forms is an acquisition to the arithmetical theory.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

Part 1, sect. 48.
Theory of Numbers, 1892

“A new type of poem has been evolved and popularized by the demands of the anthology-reading public. It is called 'the perfect modern lyric.' Like the best-seller novel, it is usually achieved in the dark; but certain critical regulations can be made for it. It must be fairly regular in form and easily memorized, it must be a new combination of absolutely warn-out material, it must have a certain unhealthy vigour or languor, and it must start off engagingly with a simple sentimental statement. Somewhere a daring pseudo-poetical image must be included…”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (London: Doubleday, 1928)

Reading, Perfection

“The Republican cause is onward. Every man who desires good government has an important political duty to perform, and, with a united and determined effort, the country will be redeemed from the misrule of modern Democracy.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Democracy, Effort, Country

“The Turkish and Greek tyrants had reduced the Bulgarian people to the lowest level of human culture, but their Bulgarians could not root out. Under the consciousness of the people there were still embryos of national sense. The Bulgarian people realized that it was a people and had its own independent state and even managed to win its people's church. Russia freed a part of the Bulgarian people. The liberated Bulgarians were called for autonomous rule, but they were divided into two divisions … One of them, called Slavophiles, was of the opinion that Bulgaria should be placed under Russia's protectorate because it could not be itself ruled … The other party, which was called patriots, was for an independent Bulgaria. The fierce struggles between these two parties fill the history of Bulgaria from liberation to the world war. Russophiles grew up with various modern trends, such as Communists, Socialists, and other truths that did not give birth to tobacco and native tobacco. Fatherland was considered a vice for backwardness. It's hard for him to say he's a patriot.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

Source: Ziezi ex quo Vulgares, "Забравеният д-р Ганчо Ценов" http://ziezi.net/cenov.html

War, People, Truth, World

“Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them (her paintings) merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate and the Salon de Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art, and to which I have been invited to participate in the past, a distinction I may add that few can boast of.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Statement made when her painting was rejected by the Simla Fine Arts Society in 1935.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

World, Art, Past, Future

“This new and enlarged edition of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism contains additions and alterations so great as to constitute it in effect a new book.”

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

Preface to the Revised Edition (October, 1906)
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906)

Books

“Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 4

Understanding, Sense

“Instead we tell the church to shut its mouth and even condemn it when at times it chooses to illuminate issues on a spiritual and moral basis, when it points to the need for tolerance, repentance, forgiving and sharing — the same principles it professed in the early days that chartered the course of modern day.”

Josefa Vosanibola Fijian politician

Speech to the House of Representatives, 12 August 2005

Forgiveness, Time

“We are using electronic instruments both in the studio and on stage but we are not living in an ivory tower, banned from any kind of popularity doing just intellectual research on electronics. So we really like to entertain people in the best way possible to show how modern, sophisticated equipment can be used today in order to create a futuristic sound.”

Edgar Froese (1944–2015) German musician and founder of Tangerine Dream

People, Way

“advice to a young painter, (1896); as quoted in Painting Outside the lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, ed. David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 30 Jun 2009, pp. 84-85, note 40”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

1890's

Art, Quotes, Universe, Painting

“French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Sore Losers" https://www.urbanomic.com/document/sore-losers/ (2016) (original emphasis)

“[asked what he thought of modern civilization] That would be a good idea.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

variant: "I think it would be a good idea" when asked what he thought of Western civilization. On p. 75 of Ralph Keyes' book The Quote Verifier (2006), Keyes writes: 'During his first visit to England, when asked what he though of modern civilization, Gandhi is said to have told news reporters, "That would be a good idea." The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cites E. F. Schumacher's Good Work as its source for this Gandhiism, as does Nigel Rees in the Cassell Companion to Quotations. In that 1979 book, Schumacher said he saw Gandhi make this remark in a filmed record of his quizzing by reporters as he disembarked in Southampton while visiting England in 1930. Gandhi did not visit England in 1930. He did attend a roundtable conference on India's future in London the following year. Standard biographies of Gandhi do not report his making any such quip as he disembarked. Most often it has been revised to be Gandhi's assessment of "Western" civilization: "I think it would be a good idea." A retort such as this seems a little flip for Gandhi, and must be regarded as questionable. A comprehensive collection of his observations includes no such remark among twelve entries for "Civilization."' The quote was attributed to Gandhi in various sources prior to Schumacher's 1979 book mentioned by Keyes above, though none have been found that mention where and when he gave this answer. The earliest located on google books being Reader's Digest, Volume 91 from 1967, p. 52, where it is attributed to a CBS News Special called "The Italians", described here http://www.larchmontgazette.com/news/bernard-birnbaum-cbs-award-winning-producer-dead-at-89/ as "a 1966 look at the nation and its people based on the book by Luigi Barzini", produced by Bernard Birnbaum and one of the 1966/1967 Emmy award winners http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0151531.html. A discussion of the quote on "The Quote Investigator" website here http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/ mentions that on "The Italians" the quote was attributed to Gandhi. Disputed

Idea

“Professor Sylvester's first high class at the new university Johns Hopkins consisted of only one student, G. B. Halsted, who had persisted in urging Sylvester to lecture on the modern algebra. The attempt to lecture on this subject led him into new investigations in quantics.”

Florian Cajori (1859–1930) American mathematician

F. Cajori's Teaching and History of Mathematics in the U. S. (Washington, 1890), p. 265; Cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/198/mode/2up, (1914) p. 171; Persons and anecdotes.

Universe

“From the point of view of the modern neurobiologist, the question whether the mind exists as an autonomous being or is simply a derivative of the coordinated action of the brain cells is unscientific and irrelevant. Regardless of the possibility of an independent existence of the soul, it has no chance to express itself without a functioning brain.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Vetulani, Jerzy (2008): Mózg i świadomość. Prace Komisji Filozofii Nauk Przyrodniczych PAU. 2/2008, pp. 37–62

Soul, Question, Chance

“Indeed, if communist central planners could have organized the economy with as much detail, precision, and flexibility as a modern-day Toyota or Wal-Mart, communism would probably still exist!”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 5, Chapter 27, Replacing Capitalism?, p. 328
Economics For Everyone (2008)

Communication

“But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Alarms and Discursions (1910), 'The New House,' pp. 161-162

People

“The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other …”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Life, Problem, Effort, Time

“But how does it come about, step by step, that some complex Systems actually function? This question, to which we as students of General Systemantics attach the highest importance, has not yet yielded to intensive modern methods of investigation and analysis. As of this writing, only a limited and partial breakthrough can be reported, as follows: A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: Systemantics: the underground text of systems lore, 1986, p. 65 cited in "Quotes from Systemantics – Funny, But Scary Too" Posted on agileadvice.com March 3, 2006 by Mishkin Berteig. This quote was mentioned in General systemantics (1975, p. 71)

Question

“I used to dislike the Whigs but in my years of loneliness I have come to the conclusion that they governed England better than anybody else. They thought our their measures carefully and adapted them to their times and generation. They were not heroic but they were wise. In modern days we see much heroism but little wisdom.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Letter to Strachey (19 October 1921), quoted in Leo McKinstry, Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil (John Murray, 2006), p. 526.

Wisdom, Time, Loneliness

“Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

It's the Demography, Stupid (2006)

People, World

“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

Walker Percy book The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

Books, Reading

“Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 77

Art

“The modern world is still suffering from the native incapacity of the Jews to be political. The art of making and preserving a City, which we call be the Greek name, “Politics,” was never an indigenous growth among the Hebrews. The City of the Greeks and the other civilized nations of antiquity was hateful to them. Their ideas were essentially anti-political. The politics of Judaea, when there were any, were borrowed from the Egyptians and Babylonians and, later, from the Greeks. These borrowings were regarded with violent disapproval by the champions of Hebrew orthodoxy, who objected to organized civilization on two grounds. Some, like Amos, hated it just because it was civilization and not nomadic barbarism. It was in the desert that God had made his covenant with the Chosen Race, and in the desert there was nothing else to think about but God. So, Back to the Desert! was their war-cry. Others, the Ebionites, objected to civilization because it was hierarchical, because it made for social inequality. They gave prophetically indignant utterance to the envious hatred of the poor in cash and in spirit against the rich and talented and cultured. A pious and universal mediocrity was their ideal.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“One and Many,” pp. 17–18
Do What You Will (1928)

God, Hate, War, World

“I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Politics, society and humanity

Thinking

“The beauty of science and the nature of scientific revelations constitute part of the modern theologian's perspective and toolbox.”

Joseph Silk (1942) British-American astronomer

Page 2.30
The Dark Side of the Universe, 2007

Beauty, Nature, Science, Parting

“The consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed. Yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest. Its most striking characteristic is its seemingly irresistible appeal… The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.”

Niall Ferguson book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

History, Reality

“Among the grievances of modern days, much complained of, but with little hope of redress, is the matter of receiving and paying visits, the number of which, it is generally agreed, “has been increasing, is increased, and ought to be diminished.”… Nor is this complaint by any means peculiar to the times in which we have the honour to live. Cowley was out of all patience on the subject above a hundred years ago. “If we engage,” says he, “in a large acquaintance, and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to a ‘quotidian ague of frigid impertinencies,’ which would make a wise man tremble to think of.””

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Life, Hope, Thinking, Time

“Although Qigong has been spread for quite a long period of time, several decades already, no one knows its real implications. Therefore, I have written in the book, Zhuan Falun, everything about certain phenomena in the Qigong community, why Qigong is spread in ordinary human society, and what the ultimate goal of Qigong is. Therefore, this book is a systematic work that enables one to practice cultivation. Through reading it repeatedly, many people feel that there is something unique about the book: no matter how many times you have read this book, you always seem to feel a sense of freshness, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always attain a different understanding from the same sentence, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always feel that there is still a great deal of content in it that is yet to be found. Why is it this way, then? It is because that I have systematically compiled many things that are considered heavenly secrets within this book, such as that people are able to practice cultivation, how cultivation should be practiced, and the characteristics of this universe, etc. For a practitioner, it can enable him to complete his cultivation practice successfully. Because no one has ever done such a thing in the past, when reading this book, many people find that a lot of the contents are heavenly secrets. After races are mixed up, you will find one's child born to be an infant of mixed blood. However, there is a partition in the middle of this child's life. If it is separated, he will be physically and intellectually incomplete or a person with an incomplete body. Modern science also knows that it is getting worse one generation after another. It would be like this”

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Falun Buddha Fa Lecture in Sydney http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/1996L.html

People, Secret, Books, Way

“In America the architect has a direct and continuing relationship with technology. Perhaps this is why he does not ask more from technology than it can offer. In our country [Russia] it is still impossible to have such urban complexes as are found in Paris, Chicago, or Berlin. It is through technology that we can build a bridge to all the most recent achievements, which is what made it possible for our country to pass directly from the hoe to the tractor without having to travel the long path of historical development. That is why we want to introduce the most modern methods of building and construction into our country — and why we see the works and designs of both the 'formalists' and the 'constructivists' as a radical experiment in the manipulation of construction.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'Basic Premises'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Travel, Country

“Clay masonry, like concrete, is a "plastic" material that permits the pouring in situ of large monoliths of any shape or form, with certain limitations and by using special methods. Its economical possibilities when used in walls of popular housing, its excellent heat and sound insulation, as well as its aesthetic possibilities, should not be underestimated. Its resistance and durability can be substantially improved by using modern techniques and methods, for example, admixture of small amounts of Portland cement in accordance with granulometric investigation, petrographic composition, and rheological behaviour of all constituents.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Housing

“It is not my intention to denounce modern education. If it is bad, it may be said that all education is bad which is not self-education, and quite a lot of self-education is going on today — some of it in our schools, under the very noses of the teachers!”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Education, School, Teachers

“Only twice have I been sorry that I had had no college degree. Such degrees are frightfully overrated in this country and though I have no degrees I know I am as well educated as those who have. Not so many years ago I was asked to give a series of lectures at The Postgraduate College in Washington, D. C. I was to speak on the intellect and the intuition… when they discovered I had no degrees… they proceeded to cancel the lectures… Shortly after I was asked by Cornell University… to speak to them on the modern spiritual approach to truth… This was also cancelled because I had no college degrees.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Truth, Education, Universe, Country

“In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence…. To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism.”

Robert Fulford (journalist) (1932) Canadian journalist

Until Trump, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in U.S. politics (August 5, 2016)

Life, People, Truth, Intelligence

“Already in my own time the volume of business was much less than in the heyday of the Victorian age, when the developments of the industrial era stimulated the enterprise of promoters and led to the construction of our modern railways, docks, and other undertakings of public utility. That was the era which my friend Walter Elliot has so aptly called the `century of equipment.”

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan (1873–1952) British judge

Source: A Man of Law's Tale (1952), In London, p. 72

Age, Business, Time

“The modern attempt to reduce Jesus to the level of political reformer, and the church to the same level, is a denial of Christ’s true Kingship.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The Mediator: Christ or the Church? The Witness of Jesus Christ (n. d.)

Christ

“Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.'
'But you are faking it.'
'At the moment I might be. But as soon as it stops being faked and starts being real, he'll turn up. Rule number one of modern life.”

Helen Garner book The Children's Bach

Page 80.
The Children's Bach (1984)

Life, Dance, Night, Indifference

“The kind of slaughter and violence that we have seen in this war, was in my experience very rare during the Russo-Japanese war. In modern war, the whole people are mobilized. Hence the majority of the troops correspond to the people as a whole. An army in which scandals and atrocities occur in great numbers, must surely reflect a decline in public morality?”

Shunroku Hata (1879–1962) Japanese general

Quoted in "Singapore, 1941-1942" - Page 269 - by Louis Allen - History - 1993

War, People

“If modern pedagogy means an effort towards the realisation of a new and more just form of society; if it means that we propose to instruct the rising generation in the causes which have brought about and maintain the lack of social equilibrium; if it means that we are anxious to prepare the race for better days, freeing it from religious fiction and from all idea of submission to an inevitable socio-economic inequality; we cannot entrust it to the State or to other official organisms which necessarily maintain existing privileges and support the laws which at present consecrate the exploitation of one man by another, the pernicious source of the worst abuses.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Law, Idea, Support, Effort

“Self-determination is now recognized as a principle of legitimacy underlying modern international law.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

Law

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Children, People, World, Way

“It is often said that our modern world is incapable of self-government.”

Robert Agresta (1983)

Scribd:Robert Agresta Inauguration speech Quoted in Mayor & Council Meeting of January 2009 http://www.scribd.com/full/54569111?access_key=key-11gd71r31loly41co5n5

World

“The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms—academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm—continue to linger on artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.”

Richard Taruskin (1945) American writer

New York Times, March 10, 1996. Quoted in Ashby, Arved, ed. (2004). The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.

Life, Music, Support, Dependency

“These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Introduction, p. 4
The Political Economy of International Relations (1987)

World

“I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 18 (p. 98)

Thinking

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Love, World, Art, Home

“It is known that the mathematics prescribed for the high school [Gymnasien] is essentially Euclidean, while it is modern mathematics, the theory of functions and the infinitesimal calculus, which has secured for us an insight into the mechanism and laws of nature. Euclidean mathematics is indeed, a prerequisite for the theory of functions, but just as one, though he has learned the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs, will not thereby be enabled to read a Latin author much less to appreciate the beauties of a Horace, so Euclidean mathematics, that is the mathematics of the high school, is unable to unlock nature and her laws. Euclidean mathematics assumes the completeness and invariability of mathematical forms; these forms it describes with appropriate accuracy and enumerates their inherent and related properties with perfect clearness, order, and completeness, that is, Euclidean mathematics operates on forms after the manner that anatomy operates on the dead body and its members.
On the other hand, the mathematics of variable magnitudes—function theory or analysis—considers mathematical forms in their genesis. By writing the equation of the parabola, we express its law of generation, the law according to which the variable point moves. The path, produced before the eyes of the 113 student by a point moving in accordance to this law, is the parabola.
If, then, Euclidean mathematics treats space and number forms after the manner in which anatomy treats the dead body, modern mathematics deals, as it were, with the living body, with growing and changing forms, and thus furnishes an insight, not only into nature as she is and appears, but also into nature as she generates and creates,—reveals her transition steps and in so doing creates a mind for and understanding of the laws of becoming. Thus modern mathematics bears the same relation to Euclidean mathematics that physiology or biology … bears to anatomy. But it is exactly in this respect that our view of nature is so far above that of the ancients; that we no longer look on nature as a quiescent complete whole, which compels admiration by its sublimity and wealth of forms, but that we conceive of her as a vigorous growing organism, unfolding according to definite, as delicate as far-reaching, laws; that we are able to lay hold of the permanent amidst the transitory, of law amidst fleeting phenomena, and to be able to give these their simplest and truest expression through the mathematical formulas”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 37.

School, Law, Beauty, Mathematics

“In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Justice of Dame Kind", p. 464
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Madness

“Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question.”

Jonah Lehrer (1981) American science writer

Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer (2009)

Question, Tree, Study, Science

“This is modern, progressive politics reflecting our society.”

Dawn Butler (1969) British politician

Maiden speech on 24 May 2005

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

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

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Wisdom, Men, World

“When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX: (p. 314).

“I try to go further on over the threshold where modern art ends and anthropological art has to start.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote by Furlang, 1974, p. 7; as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 206
1970's

Art

“Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative -- the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 19; As cited in: Bela H. Banathy (1996) Designing social systems in a changing world. p. 156.

Faith, Way, Error, Thinking

“"This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest."
"In stories," Gair agreed hopelessly. "brave men die defending the rest. But this isn't like that!"
"Call it the modern version," Mr Claybury suggested kindly.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Power of Three

Source: Power of Three (1976), p. 201.

Men, Happiness, Thinking, Suffering

“Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), p. 244.

Beauty, Nature, Universe, Time

“Had the modern professors of eugenics had power in France in 1694, they probably would not have permitted such a child to have been born. Their scientific knowledge would have shown conclusively that no person of value could have come from the union of his father and mother. In those days, nature had not been instructed by the professors of eugenics and so Voltaire was born.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Nature, Knowledge, Personality

“How is it possible that today's academic Left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy.”

Camille Paglia book Free Women, Free Men

From the Introduction http://archive.is/4luev to Free Women, Free Men https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1101871814, Paglia, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (2017) Free Women, Free Men (2017)

Life, Education, Democracy, Support

“In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.”

John Buchan book A Lodge in the Wilderness

Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. III, p. 69

God, World

“The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Last of the Nasties? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/feb/29/the-last-of-the-nasties," The New York Review of Books, 29 February 1996; Review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton

People, Sex, Imagination, History

“You mention the circle and I agree with your definition.... why does the circle fascinates me? It is (1) the most modern form, but asserts itself unconditionally, (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable, (3) simultaneously stable and unstable, (4) simultaneously loud and soft, (5) a single tension that caries countless tensions within it. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in balance. Of the three primary forms (triangle, square, circle), it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Kandinsky's letter to Will Grohmann, c. 1926; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 36
1920 - 1930

“It can be argued that the U. S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

Wealth

“They [Jawlensky and Münter] often lived here in our Murnau house. But Paul Klee and Franz Marc were also close friends, and August Macke, too, whenever he was in Munich... Klee was never as active a theorist, in those years, as Kandinsky or Marianne de Werefkin. Besides, it took Klee much longer to become a truly and conscious modern artist... As you can see in my portrait of Klee, which is painted in 1913 – I mean the one where he is seen seated in one of the rooms here downstairs and wearing white summer slacks – he is not very communicative. That is why I depicted him all hunched up and tense, as if he were constraining some mainspring within himself. In my eyes, it was almost a portrait of silence rather than of Klee, and for many years it no longer occurred to me that he had been my model. But Klee was always a close friend of ours, and Kandinsky and I had great confidence in his talent and his future.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Confidence, Communication, Silence, Future

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

Life, Truth, Education, School

“I have lately been reading Modern Painters, and I have derived from the work much genuine pleasure and, I hope, some edification; at any rate it made me feel how ignorant I had previously been on the subject which it treats. Hitherto I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art; I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold — this book seems to give me eyes. I do wish I had pictures within reach by which to test the new sense. Who can read these glowing descriptions of (J. M. W.) Turner’s works without longing to see them? However eloquent and convincing the language in which another’s opinion is placed before you, you still wish to judge for yourself. I like this author’s style much; there is both energy and beauty in it: I like himself too, because he is such a hearty admirer. He does not give Turner half-measure of praise or veneration; he eulogizes, he reverences him (or rather his genius) with his whole soul. One can sympathize with that sort of devout, serious admiration (for he is no rhapsodist) one can respect it; and yet possibly many people would laugh at it. I am truly obliged to Mr. Smith for giving me this book, not having often met with one that has pleased me more.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Charlotte Brontë, on Modern Painters, Vol. 1 (1843), by John Ruskin. Letter to W. S. Williams (31 July 1848) The Letters of Charlotte Brontë

People, Pleasure, Books, Beauty

“This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

"Jöns" (Gunnar Björnstrand) in The Seventh Seal (1957).
Films

People, Food

“People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties, and they don't know real problems… There's something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a really substantive way, of a great modern American novel.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/sep/08/fiction.features (2002-09-08) 2000&ndash;2004

Love, Hate, People, Way

““Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are—who could endure a century of transition?”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

transition [sic] was the avant-garde English-language magazine published in Paris 1927–1938; “A Note on Poetry”, p. 48
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Past, Future

“If you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home. These are all burning injustices, and – as I did with the misuse of stop and search and deaths in police custody and modern slavery – I am determined to fight against them.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Death, Health, Education, School

“At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 12
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linus & the Lunatics, Part II, 2003-11-25, 2006-08-28 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279, 2000s, 2000-04

People, Way

“Much less could regeneration, the bringing-on of voluntary repentance and genuine reformation in the soul, be by any sort of efficient causality,—a truth to which modern theology has evidently for some time been alive, as its forward movement is keyed upon the increasing recognition of the metaphor in the name. These thoughts, however incontrovertible they may be, are no doubt staggering thoughts, so much are we of old habituated to calling regeneration the "work" of the Holy Spirit, and to naming man the "creature" of God, and God his "maker." Still, staggering though they be, they must be true if human freedom is to be a fact; and that human freedom is to be a fact, the modern conscience, quickened by the very experience of the Christian spirit itself, firmly declares, having now apprehended that otherwise there is no justice in human responsibility, and then no moral government, but only government edictive and compulsory; and then — no personal God, no true God, at all!”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.334-5

God, Truth, Justice, Soul

“Pasteur originally conceived the idea of germs and of destroying them. Although this started as a personal thing, it has mushroomed into DDT, killing beetles and worms, resulting in food contamination, much sickness, and trouble. Although he is regarded as hero by modern medicine, Pasteur will be treated in much the same way as a warmonger when he is judged in the spiritual world.”

Michio Kushi (1926–2014) Japanese educator

Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 55

World, Food, Way, Idea

“The effects of Asian contacts on Europe, though considerably less, cannot be considered insignificant. The growth of capitalism in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in itself a profound and revolutionary change, is intimately connected with the expansion of European trade and business into Asia. The political development of the leading Western European nations during this period was also related to their exploitation of their Asian possessions and the wealth they derived from the trade with and government of their Eastern dependencies. Their material life, as reflected in clothing, food, beverages, etc., also bears permanent marks of their Eastern contacts. We have already dealt briefly with the penetration of cultural, artistic and philosophical influences, though their effects cannot still be estimated. Unlike the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, the spiritual and cultural reactions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are deeper, and have not yet fully come to the surface. The influence of Chinese literature and of Indian philosophical thought, to mention only two trends which have become important in recent years, cannot be evaluated for many years to come. Yet it is true, as T. S. Eliot has stated, that most modern poets in Europe have in some measure been influenced by the literature of China. Equally the number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which have been appearing every year, meant not for Orientalists and scholars but for the educated public, and the revival of interest in the religious experience of India, are sufficient to prove that a penetration of European thought by Oriental influences is now taking place which future historians may consider to be of some significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Life, Education, Food, Literature

Quotes about modernity page 7

Quotes about modernity
page 7