Quotes About Culture

Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe.

an electronic technology, cultural changes occur more rapidly than value systems can accommodate them, and in the resulting confusion technology itself becomes a surrogate religion. Christ, the core symbol of Western

On where imagination comes from: "I think it comes from fairies … certain children are visited by a fairy in their cradle, and are tapped on their forehead with a small but luminous wand. After that, even all the forces in our culture, and there are many, are unable to totally subdue it.

Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion

There's a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam," said Switters.

On the far wall, just behind the drummer, a hand-painted black-and-white sign read Traditional request $1; Others $2; The Saints $5.

This book is a song for my fathers—the white one who sired, raised, and coached me, and the black ones who inspired and encouraged me, and enriched my life beyond measure. It also recounts the life and times of a middle-class white boy growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and '60s. New Orleans is more than a backdrop to this drama; it is perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken place in any other city in the world. The

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. —Karl Popper, philosopher of science (1902-94)

Girls who kiss don't know Latin.

Only in art can empires cheat oblivion,..

The trouble is I don't like the pop music which it's all right to like. You can have a bit of Pink Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker — that shows a refreshing breadth of taste or at least a refreshing candour.

No mischlinge in journalism, the creative arts, the performing arts, literature . . . Culture is verboten.

Le goût juif, the French said.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this.

We become ads for ourselves under the pressure of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private dichotomy.

It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

Not being at home in one's homeland; [...] being exiled in the place one belongs.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it.

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn't me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don't have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside-- not American-- not black-- just me?