Quotes About Culture

They hear drums, we hear music.

I have successfully avoided enjoying opera all my life. -quoted in Entertainment Weeky, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20548...

Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publically criticized by illiterates.

A matinee, a Pinter play, Perhaps a piece of Mahler's.

When the last moonshiner buys his radio, And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl Is civilized with a mail-order dress, Something will pass that was American And all the movies will not bring it back.

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land, As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows, As native as the shape of Navajo quivers, And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

When practiced, Sabbath-keeping is an active protest against a culture that is always on, always available and always looking for something else to do.

Every time we choose to live in a daily rhythm, we are consciously allowing the larger story of God's work in the world, instead of culture, to shape our lives.

The most shop-worn joke in Manila was that the Philippines had spent "three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a brothel." The oligarchy kept the keys.

music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.

Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

C.I.A. had "a culture of insularity." The attitude they projected was "Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special

For some reason, American officials often measured the reliability of Pakistani military officers by their willingness to drink.)

I did not become successful in my work through embracing or engaging in celebrity culture. I never signed away my privacy in exchange for success.

I would happily do a third one; perhaps we could leave Europe and eat our way around America next time.

Norwich isn't the north or the south; there's a kind of otherness to it. It doesn't have an overwhelming sense of itself, like, say, Yorkshire or Cornwall does.

We think fast food is equivalent to pornography, nutritionally speaking.

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.

The Irishman raises his beer and says "sluncha" or "slawn chair" or something like that, obviously a Gaelic toast, and we bellow "sluncha!" and clink glasses and take long, deep, manly, Irish pub drinks.

The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They're just like dead fish washing up on the shores.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.