#modern

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#kora-in-hell #modernist-poets #red-wheel-barrow #this-is-just-to-say #life

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much. ↗

— Orson Welles

#f-for-fake #frauds #orson-welles #post-modernism #life

sometimes I hear screaming like a child and wake up to find it’s me ↗

— Stephen Fitzsimons

#modern-life #poetry #poetry-quotes #life

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum. ↗

— Jon Krakauer

#culture #culture-and-imperialism #modernity #progress #sherpas

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#academics #darwin #einstein #freud #institutions

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#media #postmodern #power #science-fiction #motivational

Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win. ↗

— Harper Lee

#reason

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#days #die #dog #dying #fitting

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#feminism #life #maleness #modernity #philosophy

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. ↗

— George Santayana

#appear #argument #better #function #make