Quotes About Culture

I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink…. They commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they drop into the grave.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.

Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.

the conventional sociology of literature or culture, which modestly limits itself to the identification of class motifs or values in a given text, and feels that its work is done when it shows how a given artifact "reflects" its social background, is utterly unacceptable.

In 1922, movies drew some forty million viewers weekly; by 1929 the number approached a hundred million—this at a time when the nation's population was 122 million and weekly church attendance was sixty million.

Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be.

The best use of bad wine is to drive away poor relations.

They sit for hours in the "cafes" warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about "culture" "art" "revolution" and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsenses and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true.

We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.

'Evil men have no songs.' How is it that the Russians have songs?

Only sick music makes money these days.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a couple of prize-fighters.

Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

On a beau accuser l'Occident de répandre ses erreurs dans le monde entier, encore faut-il quelqu'un qui les accepte.

Canada was the most patient invading force in the world—one penny at a time, one pop singer at a time, one actor at a time. … It might take them ten thousand years to conquer the United States, but they were on the move, and the American people needed to wake up.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

Customs have no reason; they simply are.