Quotes About Culture

Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more. That's me! And you, probably! That's us!

What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands-- literally thousands-- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.

Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?

What came first the music or the misery?People worry about kids playing with guns,or watching violent videos,that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about the kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak,rejection,pain,misery and loss.Did i listen to pop music because i was miserable?Or was i miserable because i listened to pop music?

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half of my compatriots seemed to do.

Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet.

When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.

I could end up having sex here, and the prospect doesn't appall me. What better way to exorcize rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you? But you wouldn't just be sleeping with a person: you'd be sleeping with a whole sad single-person culture. If

All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.

The immutable law of culture: if anything popular survives, it somehow becomes the property of the educated elite.

Even the Brazilian way of celebrating a goal - run four strides, jump, punch, run four strides, jump, punch - was alien and funny and enviable, all at the same time.

not even sex, especially not sex, please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.

OK, you don't know me, so you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas.

What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it. Edith

I libri, ammettiamolo, sono meglio di qualunque altra cosa. Se organizzassimo un campionato di fantaboxe culturale, schierando sul ring i libri contro il meglio che qualunque altra forma d'arte abbia da offrire, sulla distanza di quindici riprese…be', i libri vincerebbero praticamente sempre.

Some of it can, of course. The new satirical shows

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.

If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between folk culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.

When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?