Today the two cities seem to stand in contrast to each another. Florence has become a bustling and vital modern city. Whilst it may no longer nurture Michelangelos and Botticellis, there are native Florentine painters of international renown. Its ancient craft of leatherwork plays a distinctive role in contemporary fashion, and Florentines have effectively revived the old skills with stuffs and dyes and organized their distribution on a scale which dwarfs the network of the once ubiquitous Medici banks. Venice instead is apparently a city belonging only to her past, an empty shell of former glories. Its native population diminishes constantly, deserting the island for the industrial wasteland that threatens to destroy what is left of millennial grandeur. Its last remaining industry makes baubles for the tourists who come in droves to stay on a statistical average of eighteen hours, to mill about and to gawk at the remaining relics of the Seremissima’s magnificence.
—Peter Lauritzen. Venice: A Thousand Years of Culture and Civilization, preface, Atheneum (1978)
The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.
—David Elkind (20th century)
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)