Quotes on Modernism

The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

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.

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Those wretches tainted with the error of Indifferentism and Modernism hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute, but relative: that is, that it must adapt itself to the varying necessities of the times and the varying dispositions of souls, since it is not contained in an unchangeable revelation, but is, by its very nature, meant to accommodate itself to the life of man.

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

Modern man is frantically trying to earn enough to buy things he's too busy to enjoy.

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

You are born modern, you do not become so.