Quotes About Culture

Texas is not a state -- it's a state of mind.

P]eople are not reducible to the commodities they consume.

Cultural choice and consumption become both the sign of class belonging and the mark of class difference.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

La condición estacionaria del capital y de la población no implica un estado estacionario del mejoramiento humano. Habría muchas oportunidades para todo tipo de mentalidades culturales, para el progreso moral, social, para perfeccionar el arte de vivir si las mentes dejasen de centrarse en el arte de medrar" Principios de Economía Política

Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.

Kids have too much money these days, if you ask me.

That's what's wrong with America today, I guess. Something like that. I know something's wrong with America. Maybe that's it.

Academic terms did not concern them. American architects never called their style Art Deco at the time

The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn't make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.

there are many ways to interdict the growth of competence, of clear thinking, of forceful purpose, and each is a talking choo-choo in different guise: think of slasher flicks, think of pornography, think of Big Macs or tabloid/network news — each is easy to take, each seemingly an inconsequential time-killer. But ah! The ensemble of them playing their mindless tunes — the Death of a Thousand Cuts!

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

When the researchers asked adults in the United States, Canada, and India whether life is long or short, and whether it's easy or hard, the North Americans were no more sanguine than the Indians despite their statistical advantages in life expectancy and income.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Titanides were masters of song. Their whole language was song; music was as important to them as food.

Our speech is not as yours, nor our pipes so deep.

There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it's a foolish thing.

They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea--all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.

We both had to reject the concept of life after death, even if we weren't brought up to believe in it, because all human cultures are steeped in the idea.

It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident.