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Rifkin

Post-modernity was never meant to be a new age but rather was more of twilight of modernity—a time to sit in judgement about the many shortfalls of the modern age. 4

In a post-modern world where meta-narratives are treated with suspicion, any talk of universal morality is likely to be regarded with nervous dread. Post-modernism…is a reaction to the Enlightenment idea that, “One container fits all…” 366

The post-modern persona is increasingly fragmented and plastic.  376

Eric Hoover

In the late sixties we all wanted to go into teaching and saving the world…and at the same time wanted to stare at our navels and do our own thing.

…we face a radically changed global environment that makes nonsense of the last century’s theories of international relations and the ability to regulate warfare.

Morris Berman

For…”postmodernists”…their idea was to open oneself to the immense variety and richness of things, materials and ideas that the modern world inexhaustively brought forth. 32

In the 1880s and 1890s, the projected change was to shape historical thought into its fully modern form, while in the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernists strove to undo the results of that modernism. 32

Ernst Breisach

In 1939 and later in 1954, the historian Arnold Toynbee used the term to designate a historical period as postmodern—first referring to the time after 1914 and then for the age since 1975.  15

Nietzsche once remarked that since Copernicus Western culture had been on a slide downward toward nihilism. 16

The existential tension…has been seamlessly interwoven into all human activities… 19

The emergence of doubts about progress in America would come in the late 1960s. 46

…postmodernism has been part of a response to a disenchantment with a scepticism about modernity that, by 1945 had gathered formidable strength… 193

John Lukacs

…such fixed categories as Objectivism, Scientism, Realism, Naturalism are now passé—they belonged to a bourgeois world and its era.  40

…R.C. Collingwood (sometimes referred to as a prophet of post-modernism)…wrote that history is nothing but the history of ideas. 141

…Heisenberg’s…experimental discovery of Uncertainty/Indeterminancy in subatomic physics. 194

I must argue for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. 223

A crack in the ego can give rise to the self. We are born with ego we earn the self. 

What follows are quotations.  The full bibliographic citation can be found in the bibliography under Pages.

Jeremy Rifkin

The idea of the self was so revolutionary that…there were insufficient metaphors to even explain its meaning.  120

Love of Christ is challenged by love of self. 121

Privacy - a concept without any ontological standing in the Late Medieval era. 121

The word “I” began to show up…in literature in the early 18^th Century, along with the prefix self, self-love, self-pity, self-knowledge…126

In a post-modern era characterized by increasing individuation, where personal identity is fractured myriad of sub-identities and meta-identities…375

Lee Siegel

…the problem with the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self. 12

Barry Schwartz

…life is oriented towards consumption. Wealth becomes an increasingly important yardstick of status and other things receed into the background.

So much for ego.

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