Quotes About Culture

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.

I absolutely love London; it is one of my favourite cities in the world.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

Travelling allows you to see the world as it is.And that's beautiful.

People expected something for nothing, that's why they did nothing so beautifully these days.

I found my smattering of German very useful here, indeed, I don't know how I should be able to get on without it.

Los siglos pasados tuvieron y siguen teniendo sus propios poderes que el modernismo no puede suprimir.

It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?

Estamos en Transilvania; y Transilvania no es Inglaterra. Nuestra manera de ser no es como su manera de ser, y habrá para usted muchas cosas extrañas.

mamaliga, and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call impletata. (Mem., get recipe for this also.)

Most people worth knowing enjoy reading.

Not a wall in the building lacked books. Books even occupied the space above doorways.

The Smiths are singing and someone says Turn that gay angst music off.

The numbing lists of things you were supposed to have as an American to make you happy, which ultimately, of course, don't. Those aren't the things that make you happy.

She's doped up watching MTV and I want to watch the goddamn MacNeil/Lehrer report.

Everything has been degraded by what the sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us, and, in short, by the democratization of the arts.

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp.

This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.

Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.

when did the victim's worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?

No one cared what we watched or didn't, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn't yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what's now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.

When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim's worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?

All we've really done is to set ourselves up—to be sold to, branded, targeted, data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists everybody has to live under the same umbrella of rules and regulations: a mandate that dictates how all of us should express ourselves and behave.

The horror of 9/11 represented the end of Empire, a shock that moved us out of the twentieth century's binary Cold War thinking (The center will not hold) and into a world where there was, and is, no center; our enemies are insurgent and decentralized, our media also decentralized and insurgent. The culture seemed like it no longer belonged to the titans but instead to whoever could seize its attention with whatever immediacy and force.