#modernit

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

The death of God left the angels in a strange position. ↗

— Donald Barthelme

#physics #religion #uncertainty #death

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. ↗

— Karl Marx

#modernity #life

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us. ↗

— St. Anthony the Great

#christian #coptic #modernity #orthodox #saint

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. ↗

— Leszek Kołakowski

#doubt #irony #modernity #philosophy #self-criticism

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing. ↗

— Rowan D. Williams

#age #ageing #anxiety #communicates #culture

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

— Theodor Adorno

#chronological #modernity #qualitative

When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible. ↗

— Alexander Kluge

#alexandria #alphabet #although #burnt #certain