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Culture Quotes

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Culture Quotes

“Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.”

MaySeemsArtistCultureExpressionCommunicationApproachObviousLayersRealismUnnecessaryMisunderstoodAmerican CultureMagical RealismFreedom Of ExpressionIranianMagic Realism
Author:Shirin Neshat
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“If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.”

IfsWorldMaySufferingCultureGrowsMoralPeriodsCivilizationRootsDragDegradationDeterioration
Book:Jawaharlal Nehru: Excepts from His Writings and Speeches
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“Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.”

HumansMayCultureGivenSexBlackHuman BeingsRightsDiversitySocial JusticeInherentBlack HistoryBlack History MonthComplexionBlack History Month Inspirational
Book:The Words of Garrison: A Centennial Selection (1805-1905) of Characteristic Sentiments from the Writings of William Lloyd Garrison
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“Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”

WorldBelieveMaySeemsTogetherArtistCultureI BelieveBreakGraceStonesLeavingCalmGlassesCooksInstillPeacemakerCraftsmanLulls
Book:House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
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“The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.”

MayRealSelfBodyCareSpiritCultureBornDevilExcuseFleshConfusionFeminineMuseumsFierceMagnificentRoutesMasculineVesselTouristsWill PowerCathedralsDietingSkyscraper
Author:Marion Woodman
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“In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.”

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Author:Pauline Kael
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“Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.”

KindMayDoeFeelingsPurposeCulturePleasureEffectsHigherMusic IsNoblePrimariesAppealsSufficientLatterInstructionBeneficialRefinedCrudeTransitoryCoarse
Book:Works
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“One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.”

IfsMayTwoCultureReadingLiteraturePeriodsAgreeWineMythObjectivesSubjectiveYou Like ItAssessmentGreat WritersInsidiousReading Shakespeare
Author:Karen MacNeil
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“The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.”

FirstsMayCultureHeardMovementEnlightenmentMusicalViolentObligationNarrativeImpulseOrganizedEpisodesCompellingCompositionContradictorySymphonyCritiqueMonstrousParametersArticulationHistory Of MusicMusical CompositionRecapitulation
Author:Susan McClary
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“A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.”

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Author:Robert M. Pirsig
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“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture”

MenWayMayUseCultureCommunityLandCapableConceptsAbuseRegardImpactBelongingAestheticCommodityConservationHarvestReapContributingLove And RespectLand Conservation
Book:A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There
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“Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences.”

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Author:David Cannadine
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“I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.”

PeopleMayHas BeensScienceCultureFunLossStudyCollegeListeningPeriodsIntellectualLonelyWesternMalesRadioEntertainmentProductivitySatisfiedBotherEngagingConvincingCambridgeStaircases
Author:James D. Watson
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“Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all of our lives.”

MenMayHomeCultureLiteratureGivenHalfChristianityTakenOur LivesAtheismFinalsPositive AtheismSexualityNakedGrantedNecksDead ManFinal Words
Author:Marilyn Manson
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“However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. When we are sick or very young or very old, we must depend on the support of others. There is no significant division between us and other people, because our basic natures are the same. If we wish to ensure everyone's peace and happiness, we need to cultivate a healthy respect for the diversity of our peoples and cultures, founded on an understanding of this fundamental sameness of all human beings.”

PeopleIfsNeedsHumansMayYoungCultureIndividualLeftWishUnderstandingHuman BeingsSupportDependsHealthyDiversityCapableSickFundamentalsSignificantDivisionLeft AloneSkillfulPeace And HappinessSameness
Author:Dalai Lama
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“The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.”

IfsMayShowsLawCultureGrowthShapesCapableLengthCastingResistingStatureImpedimentsCasting Off
Book:Critical and Miscellaneous Essays ...
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“the pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it's by-God democratic. Sneer if you dare; this is something new in world history.”

IfsWorldShouldMayAbleAmericaCultureStuffTheoryKingsBuiltDemocraticDareSomething NewShoppingConsumerismFinestShallowWorld HistoryPremisesPyramidsMallsSneerPharaohsVersailles
Book:You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
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“Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him; but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.”

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Book:Self-help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance
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“It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them.”

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Author:Matthew Arnold
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“In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman.”

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Book:Lectures on Education
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“We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.”

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Book:For Keeps
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“Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may.”

ShouldMayPersonsMadeCountryYoungCultureChurchEnemyPiecesDiseaseLowsRageNeighborCuresTemptationDirtyNeighborhoodGossipConfessionSplitsIndulgeMaliceThoroughIndulge InDegeneratesFrivolousPestsImbecilityDirty Business
Author:J. G. Holland
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“May we, as image makers, shapers of the culture, set our sights on things we value, rituals we engage in that heal and serve. May our images honor the ordinary endeavors of common people, and may they make their way to the eyes of the weary - light to the dark, fire to the chill.”

PeopleWayMayLightEyeValuesCultureDarkCommonFireHonorOrdinarySightHealEndeavorMakersRitualWearyChill
Book:A Waist Is a Terrible Thing to Mind: A Wake Up Call
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“We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.”

IfsMenHeartMayDoeHelpingLyingCultureRealizingBornDestinySeeingGenerationsPositionHe ManDependsCivilizationRemainsWinterCeaseChosenGoldenAcknowledgeOur DestinySummitRipeCharlatansPedantsSimpletonsPhidias
Book:Form and actuality
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