“This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.”
“Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.”
“Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
“Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”
“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.”
“A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”
“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.”
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ''disenchantment of the world.'' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.”
“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.”
“You are born modern, you do not become so.”
“It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.”
“Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.”
“Anyone who lives in this time is concerned with grottiness.”
“Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.”
“You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.”
“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
“For we which now behold these present days have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.”
“When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.”
“One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.”
“It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.”
“Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.”
“I think the adjective ''post-modernist'' really means ''mannerist.'' Books about books is fun but frivolous.”
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
“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.”
“Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict.”
“I don't think we can ignore the Modern Movement. But I wouldn't have minded at all if it hadn't happened. I think the world would be a much nicer place.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”