Quotes About Culture

Football combines two of the worst features of American life," wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. "It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

It starts from the premise that black connotes evil and death in all cultures and hopes to figure out if "these associations influence people's behavior in important ways. For example, does wearing black clothing lead both the wearer and others to perceive him or her as more evil and aggressive? More importantly, does it lead the wearer to actually act more aggressive?

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.

The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered. It was the single most important feature of every home, and nobody cared.

the dissonance between the public sensitivity to genetic engineering and the actual progress being made can be seen as a signpost for the modern anti-science movement in Western culture.

The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced.

Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will, simply because they happened to be born in a particular year. It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.

this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin.

The nineties were (and shall always remain) the absolute zenith for bands whose goal was selling records.

Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

Every visual reflects the same statement: The hedonistic, euphoric, high-gloss 1980s are over. It took five minutes to killdoze an entire decade.

Hardcore Gen X-tacy was a fringe concern. Things regularly cited as generationally totemistic were almost always less popular than things devoid of cultural timeliness. Bridget Jones's Diary was more widely read than Jesus' Son. For every album sold by Courtney Love, Shania Twain sold fourteen. Over and over, the gap between what's most associated with Generation X dogma and the behavior of Generation X consumers is illogically vast.

It sometimes seems like 1995 was the year the future began. This is particularly true if the last book you happened to read was W. Joseph Campbell's 1995: The Year the Future Began.

accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious.

What happens to my generation is, we don't just watch The Breakfast Club[*] two times while it's in movie theaters. We watch The Breakfast Club sixty-nine times between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and convince ourselves that The Breakfast Club is a genius movie. You have this wrapped-up nostalgia and regurgitation and overcompensation of mediocre shit . . . and I directly tie that to the video store.

Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.

Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable

The most popular single in the world was "Livin' la Vida Loca," a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.