Quotes About Culture

If we can't be entertained, there're only two places to go. Back to the cave, or on to oblivion.

If you don't think it took a man to sit here, and stay awake, during nearly an hour of opera, baby, you better think again.

Your aunt Shannon from America.

Like Tokyo? That's the capital of

Thank you! We carry local artists and artisans. There are so many

Irish. I should have known it. Such a gift of gab you've got, and all the charm in the world.

Contrary to some expectations. Europe's brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The 'Railway Age' was also the age of muscular Christianity.

And in our culture today, tolerance no longer means to put up with something you believe to be false (after all, you don't tolerate things you agree with). Tolerance now means that you're supposed to accept every belief as true!

The Armenians," Bristol wrote, "are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.

the idea that ethnicity is in some sense an essential or primordial feature is, at least some of the time, disputable, and its use is, much of the time, disreputable.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

It's possible this whole Why do Latinos love Morrisey? question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.

Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

What music means is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

Every night, we're all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one's teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we've stopped trying to figure out what they mean.

The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine—something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn't own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don't own a TV simply means you're poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.

whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this.

I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're the right speed for 90 percent of American adults.