Quotes & Sayings About Modernism And Postmodernism

Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I think about my grandfather who's 89 years old, and the last thing he needs is more money out of his pocket. — Tim Scott

All you have to do is relax and feel your history, because it will never go away and there is no future without it. — Ray Davies

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self. — Hugo Black

Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time. — Walter Darby Bannard

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

Haiti fell over? Who built Haiti? Two of the three little pigs?! — Christopher Titus

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths. — Miguel Syjuco

You consume me. I want to drink you down, lick you up and savor every last drop of you. — Keren Reed

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants. — Robert Hughes

I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. — G.K. Chesterton

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out. — Terry Eagleton

What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety? — Jonathan Lethem

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. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

When I'm hitting, I'd play for nothing. When I'm not, any kind of money I receive makes me feel as if I'm stealing. — Mickey Mantle

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves? — Steven Pinker

The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction. — Debra L. Kaplan

In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. — Fredric Jameson

Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on. — Robert Venturi

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus? — John Leonard

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.' — Brad Holland

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement. — Martin Filler

I always wanted to scuba dive. I used to scuba dive undercover like black Aquaman. — Bernie Mac

Let's face it. There are good people and bad people everywhere. Illiteracy, poor education, wars, greed , corruption and similar factors were responsible for the problems in both India and Pakistan. Religious fanatics benefited from these factors and developed formidable socio-political strongholds in both countries. — Vivek Pereira

Postmodernism's collapse into indeterminacy is a significant weakness, yet its recognition of the implications of narratives, communities, embodiment, history, race, sex, and class make aspects of it attractive. We resist modernism's arch-rationalism as dehumanizing and its thoroughgoing scientism as reductionistic, and yet we recognize the value of its contributions. Though — David K. Naugle

Choose your love. Love your choice. — Thomas S. Monson

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. — Jonathan Lethem

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans. — Noam Chomsky

Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's. — Walter Darby Bannard

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference. — John Walford