Quotes About Culture

When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don't cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps

I've never been able to understand this generation's infatuation with using last names a first names.

No," I said. "He's a Rabinowitz. He's a semi-decent

High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.

Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter writes. "Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: 'Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!'"5

THE MIND OF THIS COUNTRY, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital.

The denigration of fairness has infected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.

The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions.

It is surely true that few people like to consider themselves enemies of thought and culture. Bush, after all, called himself the "education president" with a straight face while simultaneously declaring, without a trace of self-consciousness or self-criticism, that he rarely read newspapers because that would expose him to "opinions.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is clear that the golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as the culture wars of the past three decades.

Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information.

More than half of American adults believe in ghosts, one third believe in astrology, three quarters believe in angels, and four fifths believe in miracles.

Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets—and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.

Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.

She was English, with all the characteristics that word implies.

For in Western culture, music itself is always in danger of being regarded as the feminine Other that circumvents reason and arouses desire.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter.

What was it he sensed beneath the charm of Adelaide's wide ordered streets, grand Georgian and Victorian buildings and symmetrical leafy green squares? It is variously known as the Garden City, the City of Churches, the Athens of the South, the jewel in the national crown of arts and sciences. A city, above all, cultured and civilised. But when Salman Rushdie watched night fall in Adelaide, it was not a soft velvet cloak of harmony that he saw descend on this city.

While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but

It's still not clear that the South lost the war," said Diane. "It's driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that's the same population who elected George Wallace.

Mississippi is a place where the resistance to the Enlightenment is out in the open, making it anything but obsolete.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative. Here language is front and center. ... Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols. ... Narratives are transported through education.