Quotes About Culture

Thursday's great event was Aimé Cesaire's speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture.

Artists are the only people in a society who will tell that society the truth about itself.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.

The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need. If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like Gunsmoke, the situation would not be so grave. The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.

It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.

Men have to think about so many things. Women only have to think about men.

Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it. The multiple truths about a people are revealed by that people's artists—that is what the artists are for.

Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.

You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won't hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.

The author must rob us of our myths, and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back or personalities.

To be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege.

To open your mouth in England is...to put your business in the street: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

And the education I can receive from an afternoon with Picasso, or from taking one of my nieces or nephews to the movies, is not at all what the state has in mind when it speaks of Education.

It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. --"They Can't Turn Back," in Mademoiselle (New York, Aug. 1960; repr. in The Price of the Ticket, 1985)     The

All men, clearly, are primitive, but it can be doubted that that all men are primitive in the same way

This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a café terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus.

Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years—and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It's an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It's only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.

because intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction. It is probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

Well, when in Rome, said Jurgen, one must be romantic.

The wisdom of stories and legends is that they give us another way to understand ourselves and the place we inhabit.

A Culture of Discipline. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology