Quotes About Culture

Our culture values perfect pictures of ourselves, mirage, over and above authentic connection. But we meet one another through the imperfect particular of our bodies. Imperfection calls out for affinity—for the beloved to say, I too am broken, but may I join you?

All along, he had believed instinctually that his broken heart had something to do with the collapse of culture. He wanted to blame it on economics instead of on the fact that she was a fucking bitch.

I think the thing about gay people in that era was that we were not really especially caustic or campy, we just were so far ahead of the regular culture that we got bored very easily, and moved on to the next thing just to keep ourselves interested.

I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It's funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I'm not religious at all. I have no religion.

The function of museums is to make art worthless again. They take the work out of the market and put it in a place where it becomes part of the common wealth.

In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,

French or Foe, is a perennial bestseller, flying off shop

I don't buy Le Figaro, either. Not because it's a right-leaning paper but because I can't forgive it for "Madame," its weekend magazine full of beauty and fashion, the very name of which, it seems to me, implies that lipsticks and liposuction are far more interesting to women than the main magazine devoted

The loaded phrase "se mettre en valeur" is used all the time. It means "to make the most of yourself." This is not something the French do when they feel like it: they do it every day.

The French are not impressed by anything as banal as niceness.

The thing is, the French are highly sensitive to aesthetics. Anything unattractive—even something as insignificant as an underdressed tourist—can make them uncomfortable.

Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable.

Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?

But art is supposed to enlighten, isn't it? Not just reflect? It's to show us the best of the present modeled in the best of the past.

The end of Wisdom is freedom. The end of culture is perfection. The end of knowledge is love. The end of education is character.

A 'multicultural society' is a logical and physical impossibility.

Ones language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. ... Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spenglers view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ... What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party it is also there to elevate consciousness.