top of page
"Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies."
Standard
Customized
More

"It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way."
Author Name
Personal Development

"....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well."
Author Name
Personal Development

"In Russia you learn patience," said Ivan. "In America you learn action."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Off this fucking predictable soap opera, this will happen now, then that, then that and you say that you are christian and you start watching series of Turkey people which believe in a very different god so far god of hell - Allah..."
Author Name
Personal Development

"From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths " outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I figured this guy was a fair dinkum Australian. The type of guy that worked the land all day, cracked open a beer or two at night and called girls 'sheilas'."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -the solid state of "water."
Author Name
Personal Development
More

"What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?"
Politics

"Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine-some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone-but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him."
Reality

"I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit."
Humility

"What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime."
Justice

"It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse."
Humor

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."
Culture

"Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact."
Security

"Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen."
Criticism

"Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political."
Debate

"A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?"
History
bottom of page