“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.”
“This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.”
“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.”
“Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.”
“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.”
“Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
“I think the adjective ''post-modernist'' really means ''mannerist.'' Books about books is fun but frivolous.”
“Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”
“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.”
“I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.”
“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”
“Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.”
“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.”
“The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.”