top of page
.png){kind=small}
Culture Quotes
"For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor... To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves."
22
"Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor."
22
"Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread."
22
"Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn't look the way America does."
22
"I have read more about Oprah Winfrey's ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren't spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey's ass."
22
"Everybody blames the culture without taking responsibility."
21
"What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism."
21
"Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business."
21
"How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.'Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us."
21
"Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it."
20
"For reasons unknown, the philosophical aspect of the yoga movement has had to make way for the yoga fit revolution; today's image of a yogi is a slender and scantily clad young female doing postures on the cover of a bestselling magazine, whereas the older image was of an Indian man with long beard sitting in a cave wearing a loin cloth."
20
"I think everyone is very surprised at how 'Matrix' has become the pop culture phenomenon that it is."
20
"Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man."
19
"People who just float around in life without any direction will tell you that your dreams are not possible. Their knowledge is the perfect mirror of their results. Logic makes perfect sense."
19
"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors."
19
"All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by GA©rard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company."
19
"Porno is the unconsciousness of culture, the libido of humanity."
18
"Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first."
18
"Christmas Eve is my favorite... I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something - food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar - can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others."
18
"It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here."
17
"India's openness to new ideas is manifest in the Rig Veda: ??? ?????? ?????? ????? ??????? Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides."
17
"When I hear the word culture - I release the safety-catch of my Browning."
17
"When you need an idea about how to do anything, get quiet and relaxed and think about what it is you need to know. Then the flow of ideas will come. Be patient and let it happen. Sometimes it takes a little while, but it always works."
17
"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
16
"French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused."
16
"There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, 'Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, 'You don't believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?'We weren't some special people who had lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it."
16
"It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are."
16
"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another."
15
"All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind-the culture-has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives."
15
"Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt."
15
"Every culture loves scatological humour. That's always a favourite."
15
"My idols are Janis Joplin and Annie Lennox, who are neither of them from the typical pop culture."
15
"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life."
14
"Inheritance and culture obscure people's higher capacities."
14
"Old words are reborn with new faces."
14
"Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square."
14
"The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: The one thinks everything right that is French the other thinks everything wrong that is not English."
14
bottom of page