Modern Thought Quotes

I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.

Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it

He [Charles Darwin] had the greatest impact on the thinking of modern man, of anybody.

I was brought in touch with developing post World War I ideas in Europe.

To be awarded a prize which takes its name from an illustrious Dutchman who at the same time was a great citizen of Europe and through his writings did so much to open up our modern world of sensibility and thought is indeed a most signal honour.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

The modern position seems only another manifestation of egotism, which develops when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the rights to existence of things not of his own contriving.

The politics of traditionalisation and the celebration of Islam as a component of national identities have thwarted the possibilities of modernizing tools of thought and institutions