Postmodern Quotes:

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

- Jean-Francois Lyotard

topic: Postmodern, Extremes, Incredulity

In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

- Jeremy Begbie

topic: Theatre, Lines, Postmodern

We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

- Vaclav Havel

source: Vaclav Havel's Liberty Medal acceptance speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, www.aps.org. October 4, 1994.

topic: World, Certain, Postmodern

Don't call me a Postmodern!

- Wayne Rooney

topic: England, Call Me, Postmodern

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.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

topic: Firsts, Modern, Ends, Postmodernism, Postmodern

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

- Umberto Eco

source: Umberto Eco (1984). “Postscript to The name of the rose”, Harcourt

topic: Love, Attitude, Past, Postmodernism, Post Modernism

The postmodern worldview denies that there is such a thing as truth: historical, moral, or otherwise. It denies that truth exists independently of our perspectives and interests.

- Mark Earley

topic: Perspective, Historical, Moral, Postmodern

Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences.

- Joel Hodgson

topic: Mystery, Influence, Theater, Postmodern

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

- Kathy Acker

topic: Mean, Hygiene, People, Theorists, Postmodern

The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.

- Christine Pelosi

topic: Usa, President, Spurs, Gifting, President Reagan

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

- David Foster Wallace

source: Interview With Larry McCaffery, www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1993.

topic: Talking, Differences, Might, Postmodern

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

- Robert Hewison

source: Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

topic: Taken, Optimism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Post Modernism

The biggest problem facing our world today is a lack of hope and a lack of meaning. [It's] basically just a postmodern world in which there is no right or wrong, no better or worse.

- Jon Foreman

topic: Our World, Today, Problem, Postmodern

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

- Andrew Eldritch

topic: Art, Symbolism, Gestures, Postmodernism, Postmodern

Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

- Gilbert Adair

topic: Past, Definitions, Might, Hybrid, Suspension

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is Absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

- Robert Wright

topic: Attitude, Optimistic, Despair, Passing Judgment, Irreverent

Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion.

- Carol Plum-Ucci

topic: Bullshit, Giving, Want, Stallions, Postmodern

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.

- Chuck Klosterman

source: Chuck Klosterman (2014). “I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)”, p.151, Simon and Schuster

topic: Mother, Desire, Needs, Postmodern

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

- David F. Wells

topic: Character, Personality, Culture, Vacuous, Postmodern

You are born modern, you do not become so.

- Jean Baudrillard

topic: Modern, Born, Modernism, Postmodernism, Postmodern

If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image.

- Arnold Aronson

source: Arnold Aronson (2005). “Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography”, p.14, University of Michigan Press

topic: Views, Design, World, Postmodern

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

- Catharine MacKinnon

topic: Men, Feminist, Academia, Postmodernism, Feminist Theory

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

- Scott Turow

source: "'To hell with Perry Mason'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2002.

topic: Cost, Literature, Postmodernism, Postmodern

Without a thorough and deeply rooted understanding of the biblical view of truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, eternally engaging, antithetical and exclusive, unified and systematic, and as an end in itself, the Christian response to postmodernism will be muted by the surrounding culture or will make illicit compromises with the truth-impoverished spirit of the age. The good news is that truth is still truth, that it provides a backbone for witness and ministry in postmodern times, and that God's truth will never fail.

- Douglas Groothuis

topic: Christian, Biblical, Views, Postmodernism, Unified

Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

- Lyman Abbott

topic: Past, Batteries, Might, Postmodernism, Postmodern

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

- Terry Eagleton

source: "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism". Essay by Terry Eagleton, 1985.

topic: Sick, Revolutionary, Modernism, Postmodernism, Post Modernism

It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original--for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did...

- Irving Sandler

topic: Eras, Impossible, Modernism, Pollock, Postmodern

Sometimes...we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.

- Nigella Lawson

topic: Food, Pie, Want, Postmodern

"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.

- Ken Wilber

source: Ken Wilber (2007). “A Brief History of Everything”, p.19, Shambhala Publications

topic: Truth, Mean, Discipline, Postmodern

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

- Catharine MacKinnon

topic: Genocide, Perpetrators, Postmodernism, Post Modernism, Postmodern

American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.

- Os Guinness

topic: Confused, Thinking, Views, Plasters, Postmodern

The church must provide postmoderns with an alternity of rituals by which they can turn and tune to one another and feel connected to the cosmos.

- Leonard Sweet

topic: Postmodern

Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

- Nawal El Saadawi

topic: Veils, Plastic, Surgery, Postmodern

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

- Don Cupitt

source: Don Cupitt (2010). “Theology's Strange Return”, p.69, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

topic: Past, Reality, Years, Dissemination, Postmodern

It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.

- Fredric Jameson

source: Fredric Jameson (1991). “Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, p.9, Duke University Press

topic: Thinking, Age, Firsts, Postmodern

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

- Aleksandar Hemon

topic: Facts, Fiction, Lines, Fact And Fiction, Postmodern

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

- Alan Hirsch

topic: People, Church, Technique, Missional Church, Postmodern

It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image

- Kenneth Cloke

topic: Exercise, Organization, Voice, Terminology, Postmodern

I'm trying to paint an underwater ocean scene. It's just not working. My queen angelfish is supposed to have these bright yellow eyes and electric-blue stripes along the edge of her fin. Instead, it looks like I'm trying to paint a fried egg with some blue bacon. Maybe I can pass it off as postmodern.

- Susane Colasanti

source: Susane Colasanti (2010). “Something Like Fate”, p.54, Penguin

topic: Queens, Ocean, Eye, Fins, Postmodern

It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.

- Ken Wilber

source: Ken Wilber (2001). “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition”, p.7, Shambhala Publications

topic: Beautiful, Dark, Thinking, Shallowness, Postmodern

Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.

- George Will

source: George F. Will (1995). “The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990-1994”, Penguin Group USA

topic: Sex, Attitude, Reality, Race Ethnicity, Postmodern

I'm in a house where if the washing machine shuts off, it sings a song. If iPad gets a message, it sings a song. I'm living in a real postmodern time - every single thing sings to you to tell you it's started, it's stopped, you've got a message, you didn't get a message.

- Abel Ferrara

source: Interview with Aïda Ruilova, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 13, 2013.

topic: Washing Machines, Postmodern

Jacqueline Carey has created a postmodern fable of enormous scope and force. Santa Olivia is at once a cautionary tale of people caught in a web of lies and creeping terror, and a love song to the beauty and power of being different. At the novel's heart is the kind of grace Carey is known for: an illumination of the strength that lies hidden inside all of us.

- Eric Van Lustbader

topic: Song, Lying, Heart, Cautionary Tales, Olivia

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

- David Foster Wallace

topic: Writing, Artist, Years, Dare To Try, Revelry

If the kingdom of God had departments, we’d want to work in research and development. We felt like Jesus didn’t hang out at the synagogue, he hung out at wells. Coffeehouses are postmodern wells. Let’s not wait for people to come to us, let’s go to them.

- Mark Batterson

topic: Jesus, Research And Development, People, Synagogue, Postmodern

I try to teach a modernist and postmodernist position. On one hand, if you're a painter, you need to know the history of painting. But I'm also interested in the moment we live in. I love television, and movies, and books, and music. So I also think of art as this cultural production along with all this other stuff that's happening. So that's a kind of postmodern, not media-specific, but the times, what is your art relevant to this moment we live in versus media specificity? That's my teaching philosophy, both of those things are important.

- Tony Tasset

topic: Art, Philosophy, Book, Postmodern

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.

- Elias Canetti

topic: Men, Add, Lice, Adapted, Modern Man

The most important thing, in order to forge one's own creative personality, is to travel, to see different environments, different cultures. I wanted to try to imagine a new kind of structure in architecture. In general, architects follow fashions. They're neoclassical, postmodern.

- Shigeru Ban

source: Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

topic: Fashion, Personality, Creative, Postmodern

I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939....His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world....I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time.

- Matthew Fox

topic: Spiritual, Art, Believe, Deep Understanding, Postmodern