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 - [Modern and Modernism]

By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.
~ Dan Cruickshank - [Modern and Modernism]

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
~ Salvador Dali - [Modern and Modernism]

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson - [Humankind]

I think the adjective ''post-modernist'' really means ''mannerist.'' Books about books is fun but frivolous.
~ Angela Carter - [Modern and Modernism]

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - [Masses]

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
~ Carl Jung - [Masses]

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - [Masses]

None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
~ Vaclav Havel - [Masses]

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
~ Lewis Carroll - [Modern and Modernism]