Quotes About Culture

Falar de cultura foi sempre contra a cultura. O denominador "cultura" já contém, virtualmente, a tomada de posse, o enquadramento, a classificação que a cultura assume no reino da administração. Só a "administração" industrializada, radical e consequente, é plenamente adequada a esse conceito de cultura.

Die zivilisatorische Gesamttendenz der Konstellation von rationalen Mitteln und irrationalen Zwecken

Relativism is an illusion that arises as soon as something is handled according to foreign, transcendental criteria.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

We have convinced over one billion members of the Islamic faith that we are prejudiced against their religion, that we would deny them freedom of religion, that we want suppress their culture and invade their governments.

Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.

a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man cannot escape convention so easily: and the desire to do so has itself become a cliché.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.

A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

an attachment to his culture is, for the European, the beginning of the slippery slope.

The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

At once more social and more self-reliant than their British counterparts, they were men whose dignity had not been destroyed by a culture of dependence.

But the fact that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution.

We are the heirs of the ages

No one could fail to be impressed with the immense advance these men represented as compared with the native negro; and indeed to an American, who must necessarily think much of the race problem at home, it is pleasant to be made to realize in vivid fashion the progress the American negro has made, by comparing him with the negro who dwells in Africa untouched, or but lightly touched, by white influence.