Modernity Quotes (page 23)
Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the...
Charles Lamb
A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.
Isabelle Eberhardt
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
Jared Diamond
A szli lt s a modern genetika nagy kzhelye, hogy a szlknek alig van befolysuk gyermekeik jellemre, vagy nincs is. Sosem tudhatja az ember, kiv lesznek. Lehetsgek, egszsg, jvbeni kiltsok, beszdmodor, illemtuds- ezek alaktsra lehet mdjuk a szlknek. De hogy mifle ember l majd velk egy fedl alatt, az azon mlik, melyik spermium tall r melyik petesejtre, kt pakli krtybl mely krtykra esik a vlaszts, hogyan lesznek megkeverve, megemelve s sszeprostva az j kombinci pillanatban. J kedly vagy...
Ian Mcewan
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf
Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history -- the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of "heathens," and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere -- modern man is filled with pride in the "progress" accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism.
Savitri Devi