#modernit

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer. ↗

— Daniel J. Boorstin

#expectations #modernity #inspirational

In the world of The Age of Innocence, a financial disaster or moral scandal would permanently exile a guest from the finest dinner tables. In contemporary New York, a mere change of fashion can eliminate a place setting; therefore, the need to maintain a rigidity not of morals, but of taste, seems all the more desperate. ↗

— Wendy Wasserstein

#society #victorian #age

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love. ↗

— John Fowles

#modernity #sex #age

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197 ↗

— Daniel Libeskind

#architecture #methodology #modernity #urban-planning #architecture

When nations grow old the Arts grow cold And commerce settles on every tree ↗

— William Blake

#business #modernity #art

Christmas ought to be brought up to date,” Maria said. “It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols. ↗

— John Masefield

#gangsters #guns #modernity #dating

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion. ↗

— Ulrich Beck

#basic #modernity #overcomes #religion #secular

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. ↗

— Theodor Adorno

#chronological #modernity #qualitative

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. ↗

— Peter L. Berger

#argument #comes #go #hand #i

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#modernity #nostalgia #men