Quotes About Culture

corn sweetener is to the republic of fat what corn whiskey was to the alcoholic republic.

We used to be the drunkest nation in the world; now we are the fattest nation in the world.

In America . . . the sense of man/s relationship with the land can be found only in the Southwest.

Our culture and our religions are almost unanimous in upholding the omnipotence of parental authority.

The misogynist genuinely believes that his rage toward his partner is due to her deficiencies. It is easier for him to attack her than to deal with the real sources of his rage. He feels justified in acting out rage on women. Part of this justification may come from his experiences at home as a child, but a great deal of it comes directly from our culture.

While reading, I am moved by cadences and vocabularies, values and contexts tangential to or beyond me, but somehow pertinent to how I might begin to apprehend myself and the world differently or how foreign worlds I never encountered or even imagined might catch my attention and sweep me up in their sustained asymmetries.

According to Philippe Ariès, "the interdiction of death in order to preserve happiness was born in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century.

Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.

Boredom on social occasions is an inescapable hazard for the over-educated.

In our time, we couldn't find a virgin—of either sex—over the age of sixteen.

to the GPS system. It greeted her in French.

You think you are done with an experience once it is over and it is set into some version in a story. And there it will sit. But if you return to the experience many years later, because you are, say, urged by a movement in the culture to re-examine the treatment of women, an examination which seems to come every fifty years or so before it fades away again, then go, you might discover new details waiting for you, unnoticed.

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.

The big deal is that if employees aren't engaged, your company will suffer.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.

I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex. - A Woman of No Importance 45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

To travel is to shop.