Modern Identity Quotes

Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

In a way, our family is our modern identity.

We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

I don't think we have thought of ourselves, at least in a modern iteration, as being a nationalist country or a country that has nationalist movements.

I am a child of the 21st century.

In England, we've spent a bit of time being lost as to what our modern identity is.

I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality--a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self--evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.'

We're so trendy we can't even escape ourselves.

Modern Chinese culture is weak and lackluster.

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

In preindustrial times, the idea of creating something was more related to your personality. Personality was something that you constructed; it's something you had to actively develop and work on. Now personality is something that you have.

It used to be so important to choose what you were. Gay or straight. Male or female. I think the new generation is more fluid.

I write about modern people who share a deep sense of connection to the mysteries of the past. I find that I understand myself and my world better when I'm able to peer into history as a mirror.

The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity.

I'm a modern girl with old-fashioned sensibilities.

So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.

We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. ..If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.