The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to "think for himself" and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit,...
She would make a man of me. She puts strength and courage into me as no one else can. She is unlike any girl I ever saw; there’s no sentimentality about her; she is wise, and kind, and sweet. She says what she means, looks you straight in the eye, ...
Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.
The power of such a mountain is so great and yet so subtle that, without compulsion, people are drawn to it from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet…this worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, l...
The idea that the bumps or depressions on a man's head indicate the presence or absence of certain moral characteristics in his mental equipment is one of the absurdities developed from studies in this field that has long since been discarded by scie...
The heart of the difference between cheap-grace doctrines of guilt-free existence and the Christian gospel is this: Modern chauvinism desperately avoids the message of guilt by treating it as a regrettable symptom. Christianity listens to the message...
Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, the factory, and "progress" to define its parameters as on that intangible but much lauded entity called nature. In...
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the moder...
If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning...
Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of langu...
In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the sta...
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.
Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift
In his numerous historical and Scriptural works rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies...
Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.
I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.
A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Much of modern life is based upon a false logic, a logic that assumes that happiness and well-being come from financial prosperity.
The most obvious, most absurdly recognizable phenomena in day-to-day life often become the hardest to remain consciously aware of.