modern quotes

L'art moderne a une tendance essentiellement de  moniaque. Modern art tends towards the demonic.

- Charles Baudelaire
  L'Art romantique.

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern.

- Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
  Coningsby, bk.4, ch.1.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowlyand deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius.Theresulting performance, though lessinspiring, is far more predictable.

-John Kenneth Galbraith
  The New Industrial State.

I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
   The Major-General's song, The Pirates of Penzance, act1.

Neuere Poeten tun viel Wasser in dieTinte. Modern poets mix a lot of water with their ink.

-JohannWolfgang von Goethe
  Spru«  che in Prosa, Maximen und Reflexionen, pt.6.

Les temps primitifs sont lyriques, les temps antiques sont e  piques, les temps modernes sont dramatiques. The primitive era was lyrical, the classical era was epic and the modern era is dramatic.

-Victor Marie Hugo
  Cromwell, pre  face.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
  The Presidential Papers, preface.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.

- SirJohn Clifford Mortimer
  In the Observer, 28  Jun.

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as the theory.

-J(ulius) Robert Oppenheimer
  In Reflex,  Jul.

Tell me, frankly, what ought to remain of Lenin: an art bronze, oil portraits, etchings, watercolours, his secretary's diary, his friends'memoirs or a file of photographs taken of him at work and rest, archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films, phonograph records? I don't think there's any choice. Art hasno place inmodernlife† Everycultured modern man must wage war against art, as against opium. Photograph and be photographed!

- Alexander Rodchenko
Quoted in Robert HughesThe Shock of the New (1980).

Everyone knowsthat thelabel Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art.

- Harold Rosenberg
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played.

- Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg
Quoted in C Rosen Schoenberg (1976).

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

- Susan Sontag
  Against Interpretation,'Camus' Notebooks'.

Modern European culture is nothing but a culture of natural sciences.

-SunYat-Sen or  SunYixian
  Speech, Nov, calling for a union of Japan and China to liberate Asia from European influence. Quoted in JohnWu Sun Yat-Sen:The Man and His Ideas (1971).

   A waste of modern tenements, mean, monotonous, and wearisome.

-James Thorne
  On Penge, Surrey, now in Greater London. Handbook to the Environs of London.

The whole basis of the views of architecture prevailing today must be displaced by therecognition that the only possible point of departure for our artistic creation is modern life.

- Otto Wagner
  Modern Architecture (1895), preface.

Thereisa species of personcalleda'ModernChurchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

- Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
  Decline and Fall, pt.2, ch.4.

Randolph Churchill went into hospital†to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not 'malignant'. Seeing Ed Stanley in White's, on my way to Rome,Iremarked that it was atypicaltriumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

- Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
  Diary note, Mar.

For sheer courage and endurance, physical and mental, the two men stand together as examples of what toughness the body will find, if the spirit within it is tough; and as very worthy representatives of our national capacity for individual enterprise, which it is hoped even themodern craze for regulating everydetail of our lives will never stifle.

- Archibald Percival, 1st Earl Wavell
  Of F Spencer Chapman andT E Lawrence. Quoted in foreword to F Spencer Chapman TheJungle is Neutral (1950).

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

- Richard Wilbur
  'Pangloss's Song', from Candide.

Nothing isso dangerous as being too modern.One isapt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
  Lord Markby. An Ideal Husband, act 2.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'The Statues', stanza 4. Collected in Last Poems (1939).