#modernity

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost") ↗

— Fritz Leiber

#ghosts #horror #industry #modernity #imagination

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#modernity #age

One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity. ↗

— Tariq Ramadan

#modernity #love

I distrust every idea that doesn’t seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries. ↗

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

#modernity #philosophy #ideology

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

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#contingent #eternal #fugitive #half #immutable

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many. ↗

— Ulrich Beck

#atheism #belief #less #many #modernity

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

Modernity, though, is often surprisingly difficult to "locate." Certainly modernity cannot be defined as the surpassing of earlier forms of brutality. Perhaps it can be claimed that modernity should be equated with the possession of superior technology. But this response may itself reflect the modern fetishization of technology, which make it a magical solution for human problems. ↗

— Alexander Edmonds

#fetishization #modernity #plastic-surgery #plastica #beauty