Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice – read books.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the...

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex...

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer...

Modernity kills ghostly romance(“The Undying Thing”)

Modern politics is like watching a film with only bad guys. It soon starts to get really boring, because one of the points of stories is that they should have some sort of redeeming character,...

better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we’re passing...

I was thinking about honour. It’s a thing that changes doesn’t it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we’d laugh. There must have been...

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity’s dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presence of later-stage modernity....

To live in modernity–an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news–is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason...

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Apollinaire said a poet should be ‘of his time.’ I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in...

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see...

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the...

Right now I’m thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was emancipation. It’s a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy – and it...

You know,” he added reflectively, “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral...

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.

This is what made the difference, they used social networking for entertainment and I used it for business.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one’s own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would...

Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib...

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep....

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is...

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare...

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by...

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a...

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let’s be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.

The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange...

Search engines finds the information, not necessarily the truth.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. … That is no gap between the generations, that is a...

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It...

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same...

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

The great pagan sadness of modern man is largely due to his premonition of ultimate disaster.

The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death

I’m drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons – everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.

Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the...

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses...

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man’s power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world’s population. But...

One of the Christian’s biggest fears is appearing ‘too Christian’. God forbid, because that’s often characterized as god-awful! We want to be one, but without being ‘one of them’.