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Scottish Culture Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Scottish Culture.

Scottish Culture Quotes

“The counter-culture was global - or so we thought. For the first time we felt in touch with California and Paris, Poland and India and together we would change the world. Even Edinburgh would move to a more open and humane and anarchic direction. It and we would be a tonic to the nation and the very idea of 'nation' would become irrelevant. Scottish culture believed itself to be 'European' but surely it gloried in a powerful insularity too. And that was all to be moribund, this was a brave new world and we had no irony in that belief. The dystopias of Huxley and Orwell were forgotten - we now had the key to happiness. And surprisingly even now, it still seems we were doing the right thing and it was good.”

HappinessEuropeEdinburghBrave New WorldCounter CultureInsularityScottish Culture
Book:Justified Sinners: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter Culture, 1960 - 2000
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“Scots is a West Germanic language with a literature going back more than 800 years, yet Scotland is a country where only English is compulsory in school, and where Scotland's history is barely taught beyond primary school, and where (non-Scottish) newspaper owners have been known to prohibit the reviewing of Scottish books on the grounds that this would be 'provincial', while the myopic hegemony of the Anglocentric media enshrines a set of attitudes which routinely ignores or belittles our culture.”

MediaScotlandHegemonyScots LanguageScottish CultureAnglocentrism
Book:Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland
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“What happened in Scotland in the 1960s and the 1970s and what laid the foundation for the enormous creative achievements of the 1980s was the liberation of the voice. The Scottish voice declared its independence. The liberation of the voice was at first the acceptance of and an assertion of the vernacular. But the real liberation of the voice came not from the assertion of the rights of the vernacular itself, but from the assertion of the right to move without boundaries between the vernacular and standard English, between the demotic and the literary.”

ScotlandLiteraryVernacular1970s1980sScottish CultureStandard EnglishDemoticScottish Voice
Book:Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture
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“Perhaps more than anything in The Maggie, the 'Spirit of Scotland' image is troubling, particularly for those concerned with the way women are represented in films about Scotland. In Ouainé Bain's apt phrase, the 'fey, winsome lass' who consummates Marshall's entry into the film's Celtic world offers one of the two ultimately limiting images of women which dominate Scottish culture (the other being the Ma Broon figure who holds the home together) and forbid entry to it of images of women which accord more with the needs of contemporary Scottish women.”

CelticFeyScottish CultureRepresentation Of WomenWinsomenessMa BroonThe Maggie
Book:Cencrastus No. 12: Spring 1983
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“Yes, I go along with the idea of a Scottish Spring. It was genuinely a time of beginnings, a time of openings, and I always felt that those who left Scotland then - eg. Kenneth White, Douglas Dunn - were too impatient and should have stayed. New international configurations - Sottish-American, Scottish-Russian, Scottish-Brazilian - appeared. New genres like concrete poetry and sound-poetry challenged a fair amount of opposition. I remember Hugh MacDiarmid growling in 1970 "I'd hate an Ian Finlay poem on my gravetstone." Publishers like Wild Hawthorn, Migrant, Eugen Gomringer, Hansjörg Mayer, encouraged Scotland to see the world and the world to see Scotland.”

Counter CultureScottish CultureHugh MacdiarmidDouglas DunnIan Hamilton FinlayKenneth White
Book:Justified Sinners: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter Culture, 1960 - 2000
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“The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts.”

HighlandsScottish CultureLowlands
Book:The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence
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