The idea of traditional order is misleading

This is where the idea of a 'traditional' order is most effectively misleading. For there is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular point in time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles of property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent stages of the same essential drives.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 50

Nostalgia!

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 6

To work out a relationship to the modern which neither amounts to a nostalgic call to return to it nor an oedipal denunciation of its repressive insufficiencies – this is a rich mission for our historicity, and success in it might help us to recover some sense of the future as well as of the possibilities of genuine change.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 90

We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 82