#ode

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#media #postmodern #power #science-fiction #motivational

When somebody wins, the fighting will be over. ↗

— Lelouch Lamperouge

#motivational #motivational

Now I'm seen by more people in one episode than I was in 20 years of theatre and movies. It's gratifying to have an impact on 25 million people a night, but I can say goodbye to my lunch-pail life as a working actor. I'm scared I might be a celebrity. ↗

— William Petersen

#celebrity #episode #goodbye #gratifying #i

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l’idée de faire histoire n’était qu’un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c’est de faire nature. ↗

— Peter Sloterdijk

#modernité #nature #nature

[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#religion

There are far more reasons for death than there are for life. ↗

— Sergei Lukyanenko

#anton-gorodetsky #death #life #death

The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#p-g-wodehouse #right-ho-jeeves #home

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves? ↗

— Steven Pinker

#post-modernism #postmodernism #art

…[I]t is my view that the story of Modernism must be written as a story of contradictions, for Modernism is in itself, on its most fundamental level, deeply contradictory. Every attempt to present it as simple, homo-genous and unified is to fabricate a lie. ↗

— Jeff Werner

#modernism #sweden #art

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. ↗

— Grant H. Kester

#art-history #assumptions #avant-garde #fallacy #meaning