Modern And Modernism

(201 votes)   Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

Gilbert Adair
American Author

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(191 votes)   Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Bryan Appleyard
Australian Writer

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(113 votes)   For we which now behold these present days have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

William Shakespeare
1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor

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(110 votes)   The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
1822-1896, French Writers

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(93 votes)   I am 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
1923-1985, Cuban Writer, Essayist, Journalist

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(92 votes)   In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.

R. D. Laing
1927-1989, British Psychiatrist

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(91 votes)   The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

Norman Mailer
1923-, American Author

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(78 votes)   I think the adjective ''post-modernist'' really means ''mannerist.'' Books about books is fun but frivolous.

Angela Carter
1940-1992, British Author

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(78 votes)   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
1832-1898, British Writer, Mathematician

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(75 votes)   Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

Lewis Mumford
1895-1990, American Social Philosopher

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(71 votes)   It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

Edgar Z. Friedenberg

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(71 votes)   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
1919-1983, Belgian-born American Literary Critic

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(67 votes)   In these great times which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words... in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me -- none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.

Karl Kraus
1874-1936, Austrian Satirist

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(58 votes)   By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.

Dan Cruickshank

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(52 votes)   It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

Christopher Lasch
1932-, American Historian

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