#Modernity Quotes

“We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.”

“Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.”

“How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?”

“America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.”

“The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.”

“A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.”

“There wasn't any Republicans in Washington's day. No Republicans, no Boll Weevil, no income tax, no cover charge, no disarmament conference, no luncheon clubs, no stop lights, no static, no head winds. My Lord, living in those days, who wouldn't be great?”

“Without electricity, the air would rot.”

“The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

“The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”

“The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.”

“The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.”

“Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.”

“Nature is always behind the age”

“There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.”

“Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.”

“In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.”

“Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.”

“If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.”

“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”

“...the reason for [this age's] anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.”

“The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.”

“What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.”

“Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.”

“There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.”

“Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.”

“Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.”

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”

“Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.”

“We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we're shopper-borrowers.”

“When I find out a hotel doesn't have a DSL, it's like "What? There's no toilet?" Once you get used to high speed you ain't going back”

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.”

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.”

“Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.”

“It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.”

“Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes - it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

“Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.”

“Our society has become an employee society.”

“And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.”

“Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.”

“The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.”

“The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.”

“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

“As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.”

“This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.”

“These are the days of lasers in the jungle, staccato signals of constant information.”