Postmodern Quotes

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

  Vaclav Havel

  World, Certain

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

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• 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

  Firsts, Modern, Ends

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• 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

  Love, Attitude, Past

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

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• 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

  Perspective, Historical, Moral

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

  Joel Hodgson

  Mystery, Influence, Theater

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• 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

  Mean, Hygiene, People

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

  Christine Pelosi

  Usa, President, Spurs

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• 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

  Talking, Differences, Might

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

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• Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

  Robert Hewison

  Taken, Optimism, Modernism

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

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• 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

  Our World, Today, Problem

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

  Andrew Eldritch

  Art, Symbolism, Gestures

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• 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

  Past, Principles, Batteries

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• 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

  Attitude, Optimistic, Despair

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

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  Extremes, Incredulity

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• 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

  Giving, Bullshit, Needs

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• 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

  Mother, Desire, Needs

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

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

  David F. Wells

  Character, Personality, Tvs

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• You are born modern, you do not become so.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Modern, Born, Modernism

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• 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

  Views, Design, World

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

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• 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

  Men, Feminist, Academia

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.62, Harvard University Press

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• Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

  Scott Turow

  Cost, Literature, Postmodernism

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

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• 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

  Christian, Biblical, Views

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• 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

  Future, Past, Batteries

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

  Terry Eagleton

  Sick, Revolutionary, Modernism

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

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

  Irving Sandler

  Eras, Impossible, Modernism

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