Quotes About Culture

Todos los niños son unos cerdos.

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.

It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past and like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near the surface of everyone's consciousness.

a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

Ac- cording to Chesterton, tea-drinking' is 'pagan', while beer- drinking is 'Christian', and coffee is 'the puritan's opium'.

If ever there had been a place to begin a religion, it was Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century.

in Chicago in 1893. While they introduced the American people to such new words as reincarnation, nirvana, and Karma, the new religions also echoed the creed of self-reliance that had been an article of faith in American religion and culture for almost a century.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d'empire que les idées. (It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.)

A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average. And is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

American creative energy has always teetered on the brink of insanity.

It is my belief that we Americans, geographically isolated as we are, tend to be perhaps not as knowledgeable about other cultures as we might be. This is regrettable. Since we are the sole remaining superpower, it is desirable that we know something about the rest of the world, because otherwise, when we take over different parts of the world, how will we know how good we did?

God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.

Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn't. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?

If I had my way I'd move everybody up to Canada. It's nice there. Very polite. We went for a weekend last fall and got a flat tire and these two farmers with bright-red faces insisted on fixing it, then springing for dinner, then starting a college fund for the babies.

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.

the people who used to ask, "Is it news?" now seem to be asking, "Will it stimulate?" And the change is felt, high and low, throughout the culture.

We're in a culture that doesn't value writing as highly as it should. And I think we see that in our public discourse, I think we see that in our susceptibility to the big ol' lie.

El escritor de hoy tiende a usar cada vez menos palabras y cada vez más simples, tanto porque la cultura de masas ha diluido el concepto de cultura literaria como porque la suma de realidades que el lenguaje podía expresar de forma necesaria y suficiente ha disminuido de manera alarmante.

George Steiner

Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.

Ningún lugar es aburrido si me dan una mesa, buen café y unos libros. Eso es una patria.

For the late-twentieth-century reader, says Borges, Joyce comes before Homer, and the Odyssey is a late commentary on Ulysses .