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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
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Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.
-Bryan Appleyard
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This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
-Matthew Arnold
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Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
-Charles Baudelaire
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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 Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.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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You are born modern, you do not become so.
-Jean Baudrillard
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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
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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
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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
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I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
-Angela Carter
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Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.
-Le Corbusier
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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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Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
-Salvador Dali
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In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
-Guy Debord
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Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
-Terry Eagleton
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The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.
-Umberto Eco
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It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.
-Sir Arthur Eddington
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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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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 de Goncourt
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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.
-Gunther Grass
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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.
-Alexander Herzen
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Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.
-Robert Hewison
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When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
-Eric Hoffer
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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
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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
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Books about Modern, Modernism
