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We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.

When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

The question of modernization is central to disturbances in the Middle East and in Africa. Everyone is after modernization, no matter where they come from. But you have to be careful about it, and more importantly, you have to have sense about it.

We are part of a country that outshines those that have gone before us and most of those in existence today.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.