Quotes About Culture

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life.

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

Emerson, a shrewder prophet [than Freud], could have told Freud that psychoanalysis was another form of the triumph of literary culture over science, as well as over religion and philosophy.

The best leaders strive to create a "family environment" within their organization.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine , July 2006]

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama

They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.

You won't find better people than in New York.

That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.

They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity." Dr.