Best Culture Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 35

“The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.”

“The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”

Art Hard Facts Values Dies Culture Belief Study Feminist Objectives Scholarship Ideological Excluded Biased Neutrality

Author:Adrienne Rich

“It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.”

World Culture Issues Rights Feminism Integrity Commitment Asking Chosen Civil Rights Radical Categories Honored Preference

Author:Adrienne Rich

“It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.”

People Mean Culture Easy Forget Europe

Book:Journeys Between Wars

Source: Journeys Between Wars

“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”

Ifs May Whole Purpose Culture Three Asks Belief Lines Moral Shapes Elements Strings Solitary Configuration

Book:The Culture We Deserve

Source: The Culture We Deserve

“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”

Doe Book Soul Country Body Culture Money Known Teacher Birth Intellectual Towns Mad Library Folks Circles Desert Grades Village Clutch Scholarly Our Town Craze Books And Music

Author:Rebecca Harding Davis

“... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.”

Book Self Culture Tears Titles Censorship Examination Lyrical Mickey Self-examination Lesbianism

Book:The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches

Source: The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches

“In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think.”

“It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.”

Doe Two Culture Natural Creativity Civilization

Book:What are Masterpieces

Source: What are Masterpieces

“... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.”

Way Art Culture Clear Air Sky Land Wind Drink Lows Heavy Homeland

Book:How Writing Is Written

Source: How Writing Is Written

“The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.”

Art Culture Politics Belief Existence Critical Disaster Disrespect Dispensable

Author:Twyla Tharp

“I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.”

Thinking Culture Literature Fashion Approach Thoughtful Fades Infallible Fads

Author:Ellen Glasgow

“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”

Culture Courage Modern Youth Whirlwind Insolent

Author:Ellen Glasgow

“There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal.”

Thinking Trying Important Hard Culture Taste Regard Important Things Tolerate Worn Coats Fur Lice Fur Coats

Book:Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

“The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.”

Culture Cities Streets Vienna Asphalt

Book:The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus

Source: The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus

“What counts is the cultural level”

Culture Levels

Book:The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Source: The Cantos of Ezra Pound

“Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own.”

Men Long Today Law Values Culture Half Taken Week Messages Female Abuse Function Males Killing Injustice Valuable Sentences Our Society Jail Misogyny Infidelity Equations Adultery

Author:Anna Quindlen

“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”

Source: God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays

“Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.”

“American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

Way Seems Values Culture Sex Race Education Streets Civilization Institutions Western Bent Western Civilization

Author:Ishmael Reed

“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”

Different Culture Race Education African American Treatment American Culture African American Culture Tarzan Movie

Book:Airing Dirty Laundry

Source: Airing Dirty Laundry

“High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .”

Children Culture Race Generations Obsession Considering Sequence Predecessors Perversion Relays Relay Races

Author:Milan Kundera

“The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that.”

Humans Has Beens Reason Culture Language Animal Morality Argument Tools Uniqueness

Author:Carl Sagan

“thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding, Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.”

Care Culture Reading Taught My Friends Thanks Breeding

Book:Dr. Watts' Divine and moral songs, improved, and rendered suitable for persons of both sexes, and of all ages. By J. Scott

Source: Dr. Watts' Divine and moral songs, improved, and rendered suitable for persons of both sexes, and of all ages. By J. Scott

“A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.”

Mind Has Beens Culture Taught Exercise Degrees Faculty Fountain Tolerable

Book:Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism

“On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.”

Culture Doors Directors Closed Doors

Author:Billy Wilder

“The boundaries of culture and rainfall never follow survey lines.”

Culture Lines Boundaries Surveys Rainfall

Author:J. Frank Dobie

“The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.”

Whole Culture Grows Sun Rain Climate Species Disappear Replaced Small Things

Book:A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

Source: A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”

World Needs Mean Children Littles Doe Philosophy Culture Moral Wife Dangerous Source Healthy Concern Gender Welfare Guidance Tension Gender Equality Degrade Healthy Family Slappers

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich

“Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

Knows World Mean Has Beens Said Matter Culture Concern Perfection Pursuit

Author:Matthew Arnold

“Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.”

Looks Light Hate Culture Passion Hatred Sweetness Machinery Great Passion

Author:Matthew Arnold

“... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.”

“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”

Matter Problem Age Culture Answers Modern Century Mass Camps Elites Detachment Nineteenth Century Prerogative Surrogates Dandy Mass Culture Dandyism

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

Source: A Susan Sontag reader

“Democracy is not just constitutional and legislative rules; it is a culture and practice and adhering by the law and respecting international human rights principles.”

Humans Law Culture Principles Practice Democracy Rights International Human Rights

Author:Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa

“Children in the 21st (century) have been transformed from net producers of their own toy and play culture, to net consumers of play culture imposed by adults.”

Children Has Beens Play Culture Century Adults Producers Consumers Transformed Toys 21st Century

Author:David Elkind

“The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.”

Kind Culture Numbers Plans Land Broken Broke Fixed Agreement Skepticism Civil Society Nomad Broke Up Settlers Sceptic

Book:Critique of Pure Reason: In Commemoration of the Centenary of Its First Publication

Source: Critique of Pure Reason: In Commemoration of the Centenary of Its First Publication

“He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.”

“There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.”

Truth Culture Understanding Known Instance Forsaken

Author:Johan Huizinga

“The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.”

Science Culture Progress Conception Cosmic Integrated New Knowledge

Author:Johan Huizinga

“Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.”

Mean Hands Might Science Culture Secret Principles Technology Higher Organization Instruments Inspired Supreme Saving Abstract Latter Over It

Author:Johan Huizinga

“Culture means control over nature.”

Mean Culture Nature

Author:Johan Huizinga

“Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.”

Firsts Spiritual Certain Values Culture Materials Balance Spiritual Values

Author:Johan Huizinga

“Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table and wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.”

“Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.”

Country Government America Culture Force Social Natural Struggle Environment Groups Economic Weak Wide Unified Natural Environment Social Groups Weak Government

Author:Johan Huizinga

“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”

Culture Social Cases Impossible Civilization Disease Concepts Crisis Metaphor Obvious Disorder Domain

Author:Johan Huizinga

“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”

Humans Feelings Culture Social Simple Principles Concepts Supreme Obligation Realization Range Employee Dependence Indispensable Employers Fertile Social Relationships

Author:Johan Huizinga

“On Keith Richards: He's like a monkey with arthritis.”

Culture Monkeys Keith Arthritis

Author:Elton John

“On Madonna: She's a gay man trapped in a woman's body.”

Men Body Culture Gay Trapped Gay Men Women's Bodies

Author:Boy George

“Girls have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much, be polite,but be yourself, be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don't comment on the sexism. . . . Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become.”

Want Long Young Culture Girl Too Much Achieve Adults Bases Caught Appearance Being Yourself Feminine Sexism Comment Heritage Young Women Polite Cultural Heritage

Author:Mary Pipher

“One of life's intriguing paradoxes is that hierarchical social order makes cheap rents and outré artists' colonies possible. Raffish bohemian neighborhoods flourished in the days of racial segregation; under integration the artistic poor have no safe places in which to create.... If America lacks a vigorous culture it is partly because studios and ateliers have become crack houses.”

Culture Quotes

Related topics

Culture Quotes