Quotes About Culture

Well, you must be pretty desperate when you have got to go to Boston for your entertainment.

him—ce genie-la. Every nation has its own ideals of every

You Americans have such odd ways! the Baroness declared. You never ask anything outright; there seem to be so many things you can't talk about. ................. We don't like to tread upon people's toes (Chapter 6)

You see, I believe greatly in the influence of women. Living with women helps to make a man a gentleman. (Chapter 7)

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

She's a contemporary of the Medici; she must have been present at the burning of Savonarola, and I'm not sure she didn't throw a handful of chips into the flame.

arcipreste de Hita, en cuyo Libro de Buen Amor supo presentar (como Chaucer con sus obras en Inglaterra) una imagen fiel, a la vez que cargada de ingenio, de la vida de su tiempo.

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. as soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the lose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.

There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.

In her tight-fitting Persian dress, with turban to match, she looked ravishing.

The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.

De wiegen der beschaving zijn de verpestende riolen van de wereld, het knekelhuis waarin de stinkende baarmoeders hun bloederige pakjes vlees en been toevertrouwen.

I can never forget that Chinese student I knew in Paris - Mr. Tcheou, I think it was. One day, upon asking him if he had ever read Hamlet , he answered: You mean that novel by Jack London?

There are evidences of a very great art in Europe as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and in Egypt as far back as sixty thousand years. Money had nothing to to do with the production of these treasures. Money will have nothing to do with the art of the future.

Though he exudes culture and learning, he is at home with children, nobodies and idiots. His daily routine is so simple as to be almost primitive. It begins with a long morning prayer for the protection of the creature world against the sadistic men of science who torture and vivisect them. Without wants, he has become free as a bird, and what is more important, he is acutely aware of his hard-won freedom and rejoices in it.

If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike. But if you dream something different, you are not in America, of America American, but a Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a different thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.

Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis.

He is American through and through, and Americans, despite their talkiness, are fundamentally silent creatures. They talk in order to conceal their innate reticence. It is only in moments of deep intimacy that they break loose.