A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state and this state is constant.

A fact of modern life is that it takes women longer to get ready than men.

Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.

In our modern world of interdependent nations hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.

Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war and in modern Sri Lanka.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.