Quotes About Culture

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than owning material things. I also see art as something people will do rather than consume, and do it as a natural part of their lives; creative endeavors are a form of profound spiritual satisfaction.

a Virgin Islan'." "Then you are American," I said. I remembered from school that we had bought the Virgins from Denmark. He laughed. "I suppose, young bahss. I nevar gave it much thought. I sail all d'islan's, as well as Venezuela, Colombo, Panama.… I jus' nevar gave

In Sicily where food is love and the street is a stage street food is more than a cheap meal it's Communion.

Marriage is the best compromise between nature and culture.

Spiritualism exits only for individuals. Reason is born when two men interact; addition of more and more members necessitates the spreading of the reason culminating as culture. Hence a culture is as dynamic as the reason. The nature of the reason is the nature of the spirit within for some and instinct for some others.

The conscience is a right mix of instinct, reason and culture. The conscience itself is not a truth but it has an ability to access the truth. But the very conscience is assembled only by the reason.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

If outside forces and culture were the reasons behind declining and non-influential churches, we would likely have no churches today. The greatest periods of growth, particularly the first-century growth, took place in adversarial cultures. We are not hindered by external forces; we are hindered by our own lack of commitment and selflessness.

The reason you create music or art or write is in order to put things in a way you can possibly deal with them, and death is one of those areas... If you're accused of being morbid or bleak then you're onto a good thing, I'd say. Our culture is the most fucking desperate culture, desperately trying to avoid anything vaguely depressing.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then Mythology has no claim to the appellation.

If there are no books. There is no civilization.

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)

The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as "glamour." In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.