Modernity Quotes

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

Antonio Gramsci

The common dogma is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defence against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity

G Gaia

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned

Antonio Gramsci

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimesunless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regimes safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curvehowever and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.

Ian Bremmer

You see before you a man in his right mind Worldly-wise and with access to death Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies Having sometimes even astonished the professors Good with languages Having travelled a great deal Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform Having lost my best friends in the butchery As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know

Guillaume Apollinaire

Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. Women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them.

Allan David Bloom

Nietzsche restored something like the soul to our understanding of man by providing a supplement to the flat, dry screen of consciousness, which with pure intellect looks at the rest of man as something alien, a bundle of affects of matter, like any other object of physics, chemistry and biology. The unconscious replaces all the irrational thingsabove all divine madness and eroswhich were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity. It provides a link between consciousness and nature as a whole, restoring therewith the unity of man.

Allan David Bloom

The side of modernity that is less interesting to Americans, which seeks less for political solutions than for understanding and satisfaction of man in his fullness or completeness, finds its profoundest statement in Nietzsche.

Allan David Bloom

Professors of the humanities have long been desperate to make their subjects accord with modernity instead of a challenge to it. The effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime, ever since the intentional fallacy was instituted. There are endless debates about methodsamong Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstructionism, and many others, all of which have in common the premise that what Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant. These schools of criticism make the writers plants in a garden planned by a modem scholar, while their own garden-planning vocation is denied them.

Allan David Bloom

Machiavelli follows Callicles in Platos Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it.

Allan David Bloom
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