Michael Portillo Quotes

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

It's important to move the theatre into the 21st Century.

One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

There wasn't so many ISSUES like there are today. It was a simpler time.

In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. I suppose we all realize the degree to which fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.

Please, join the modern world.

Things have changed so much. People walked away from a simple life we had in the '20s and '30s, and I am glad that I am able to touch that period in our lives with the shows that I do and with the music that I do.

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.

China itself is now in the process of sloughing off not only the communist system, but also those outdated parts of Confucianism that prevent the rapid acquisition of knowledge needed to adjust to new ways of life and work.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.

It is undeniable that the French were in a better situation in 1960s then than they are today in 2017. I don't look in the rearview mirror. But there was no need for us to experience an end to social progress since then.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Domains like Trade, Technology, Tourism, Talent and Tradition have the power to redefine existing paradigms.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

The past is never where you think you left it.

My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.