Home > Topic > the modern idea
1 " Miss Jenkyns wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior. "
― Elizabeth Gaskell , Cranford
2 " She was proud of her build, which was in accordance with the old Botswana ideas of beauty, and she would not pander to the modern idea of slenderness. That was an importation from elsewhere, and it was simply wrong. How could a very thin woman do all the things that women needed to do: to carry children on their backs, to pound maize into flour out at the lands or the cattle post, to cart around the things of the household—the pots and pans and buckets of water? And how could a thin woman comfort a man? It would be very awkward for a man to share his bed with a person who was all angles and bone, whereas a traditionally built lady would be like an extra pillow on which a man coming home tired from his work might rest his weary head. To do all that you needed a bit of bulk, and thin people simply did not have that. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #16)
3 " a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known "
― Carl Lotus Becker ,
4 " Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration "
― Neil Postman , Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
5 " Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God. "
― Charles Taylor , Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
