These modernity quotes will inspire you. Modernity, the quality or condition of being modern.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging modernity quotes, modernity sayings, and modernity proverbs.
Best Modernity Quotes
- “It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately, it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.” ~ Salvador Dali
- “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” ~ Marshall Berman
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“Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.” ~ Bryan Appleyard
- “Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.” ~ Le Corbusier
- “Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “Modernity is the ensemble of changes – intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic – that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.” ~ George Scialabba
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“Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.” ~ Robertson Davies
- “Modernity is not about dress codes.” ~ Queen Rania of Jordan
- “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.” ~ Italo Calvino
- “We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.” ~ Jean Baudrillard
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“What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
- “We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.” ~ Jacque Fresco
- “I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.” ~ Angela Carter
- “The liquid state of modernity is corrosive to continuity.” ~ Samuel Wilson
- “Religion and modernity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.” ~ Queen Rania of Jordan
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“Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.” ~ Marilyn Manson
- “A ‘modern’ man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.” ~ Elias Canetti
- “Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.” ~ Guido von List
- “He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter–until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.” ~ Peter L. Berger
- “Being concerned about other people is especially relevant in today’s world. If we consider the complex inter-connected ness of our modern lives, how we depend on others and others depend on us, our outlook will change. We’ll begin to see ‘others’ not as somehow distant from us, but as people we are in touch with, people close to us; we will no longer feel indifferent to them.” ~ Dalai Lama
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“If I paint like a barbarian, it’s because we live in a barbarous age” ~ Karel Appel
- “We’ve had the Iron Age, the Stone Age, this is the pissin’ about age.” ~ Karl Pilkington
- “When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.” ~ Jean Baudrillard
- “If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.” ~ Bruno Latour
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“Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.” ~ Gianni Vattimo
- “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad – at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?” ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould
- “The narrow gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s
wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written.
Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.” ~ Marty Neumeier -
“The moderns do not realize modernity.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” ~ Bram Stoker
- “The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.” ~ Anthony Giddens
- “We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “The structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others.” ~ Henry Giroux
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“Modernity is the most transient of qualities.” ~ Anthony Daniels
- “A lot of people criticized me for speaking out, not long ago, about gay marriage. I could not remain silent any longer. It’s the civil rights of our day. It’s the issue of our day.” ~ Joe Biden
- “My interest has always been in an architecture which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of historical references. My work deals with what is happening now—our techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.” ~ Jean Nouvel
- “If they analyze the situation as thoroughly as they should, Muslims will realize they are the first targets. What are the fundamentalists really after? Simply taking over Islam and then turning its back on modernity.” ~ Alexander Haig
- “There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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“Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I’m more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.” ~ Dylan Moran
- “To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the inevitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.” ~ Anthony Giddens
- “High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalized ‘climate of risk’ characteristic of late modernity – one characterized by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.” ~ Anthony Giddens
- “Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called alter modernism, a movement connected to the creolization of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.” ~ Nicolas Bourriaud
- “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 , Tradition and modernity quotes
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“Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.” ~ Robert Bork
- “Altermodern is an in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalization, stressing the experience of wandering in time, space, and mediums. The term ‘altermodern has its roots in the idea of ‘other-ness (Latin alter = ‘other, with English connotation of ‘different) and suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route. It suggests that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, symbolized by global financial crises.” ~ Nicolas Bourriaud
- “For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.” ~ David Bentley Hart
- “Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.” ~ Thomas Oden
- “Whether we like it or not, the modernity is something that comes from Western countries, and when the modernity comes to the Eastern countries, although they feel like they really need it, at the same time it shakes the very fundament of the culture – there is always this challenge between the two.” ~ Asghar Farhadi
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“The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear — and even, in certain respects, would be — the most modern of critical movements.” ~ Paul de Man
- “I always thought that in the countries that the modernity kicks in later, it seems that everything changes on the surface, the physical things change, but inside, things haven’t changed, really. This is always the challenge of this kind of community, to make a harmony between the cultural traditions and the modernity of modern life.” ~ Asghar Farhadi
- “It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was “in principle” unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
- “Once we decided to do a tower in New York, it had to say something about our group, reflecting the mix of modernity and creativity in our organization. It’s a symbol.” ~ Bernard Arnault
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“Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.” ~ Pranab Mukherjee
- “If you say the world is totally dependent on oil in many parts of the world, coal and certainly natural gas, we are fossil fuel, that is modernity, modernity has two elements: individualism and oil. Now to move toward a more enlightened sustainable world, we have to transform with lots of technology, with even differences in the way we see the world and how we live in the world. That`s going to take decades.” ~ Jerry Brown
- “[X-ray’s] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity’s fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).” ~ Walead Beshty
- “Alexander McQueen was one of the greatest fashion designers of his generation. His genius, sometimes provocative, admired and saluted by all, constantly opened new perspectives. Visionary and avant-garde, his creations took their inspiration from both tradition and timeless hyper-modernity.” ~ Francois-Henri Pinault
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“I’m operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it’s my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.” ~ Liam Gillick
- “[W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.” ~ John Christy
- “Africa must take the first steps into modernity on its own. There must be a change in mentality. We have to stop perceiving ourselves as beggars.” ~ James Shikwati
