#modernity

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

Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country. ↗

— Emile Lahud

#country #democracy #good #good governance #governance

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#already #china #could #exclude #islamic

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

General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except everything. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#generalization #modernism #postmodernity #art

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#corruption #court-system #courts #ethical-behaviour #ethics

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. ↗

— Paul de Man

#came #could #departure #desire #earlier