Quotes About Culture

Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.

You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say "I want to be famous." You ask them for what reason and they don't know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.

Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'--affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.

Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'

We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.

But one thing we do know for certain – for years afterwards, when asked who was the greatest Englishman he had ever met, Ibn Saud would answer without hesitation: 'Shakespear!' 1

When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book - not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

I'll wager that in ten years it will be fashionable again to be a virgin.

Men aren't the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they've been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate.

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a "gift," was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

LEONARD I've failed, Chris. I can't locate the white collective unconscious. CHRIS I wouldn't feel too bad about that. You know, western culture hasn't really carried the baton on folklore and mythology. The rise of Christianity put the kibosh on it--the gospel hits the number one best-seller list and everything else gets remaindered.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.