Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

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.

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

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.

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

Anyone who lives in this time is concerned with grottiness.

For we which now behold these present days have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

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.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict.