Quotes About Society

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.

All art is political, all art is a martial one.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.

But, you see, the theatre is not always art in America.

there is no politically neutral art.

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.

All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value.

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

Art has to be reflective of our society.

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

conversation is now pretty well a lost art.

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.

It's hard to tell what's true compassion, when it's dressed up in hair and nails and fashion.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

Sure, the killer was my son, but I didn't teach him to pull the trigger of the gun. It's the killer on this TV screen, you can't blame me, it's the images he sees.

A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.