#modernity

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

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

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. ↗

— Antonio Gramsci

#challenge #disillusioned #illusions #live #modernity

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

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

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

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

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

— Donald Barthelme

#physics #religion #uncertainty #death