In the case of 'The Housewives,' I call the 'Housewives' sociology of the rich. I think it's just fun to watch. It's guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It's like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind.
When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the te...
The unadorned gentleman's suit was the product of the change from rigid status to social structures constantly shifting in response to the forces of modern capitalism, becoming ever more egalitarian in both appearance and reality.
Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah...and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. ["Modern Christian Thought: The twentieth century, Volume 2" by James C. Livingston, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, p.13]
You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.
We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the spee...
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and te...
All political parties, organizations, and all people should abide by the constitution and laws without any exception. They must all act in accordance with the constitution and laws. I see that as a defining feature of modern political system developm...
…Shunsuké hated the preoccupation with modern psychology that judged his casual, offhand remarks or his daily actions as betraying his identity or ideas with better clarity than did his highly polished sentences.
Winning the Pritzker assures a flood of work in one's seventies and eighties, jobs necessarily carried out by assistants as the demands of modern-day cultural stardom and the inevitable waning of physical capacities prevent many architects from attai...
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?
The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.
The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.
This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.
