Quotes About Culture

Britain: the land of embarrassment and breakfast.

The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it;

Why do you think this great nation of ours loves the Royal Family? Gun Law. If we didn't have it, you'd be asking the opposite question.

Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.

This being Europe, I felt it safe to kiss her on the cheek.

Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country.

Art outlasts individual whim, family pride, society's orthodoxy; art always has time on its side.

I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant.

Sex as civic duty? I thought, somehow, this was very Dutch. Also, sort of adorable.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn't call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn't.

But people don't on the whole fart raucously in Mozart [concerts]. So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding. ~Vigilance, by Julian Barnes

She had that absolute faith in the judgement of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914. No doubt it was common enough before then, which must have made Edwardian society such a philosophically relaxing place to be. If one were an aristocrat.

The past, as we have been told so many times, is a foreign country where things are done differently.

Language too is a brake upon social change.

He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture.

Governments, as we have seen, look to art as a social salve, and hope that socially interactive art will act as bandaging for the grave wounds continually prised open by capital.

Czechoslovakian

MOSTLY, they were ashamed of us.

For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don't know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.

History is precious; ritual is precious. Lose that and we lose the knowledge of our own being, Lose the thread of ancestry, lose the tales, and we are adrift without identity.

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, I think, therefore I am: Americans do not think, yet they are.

Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.

Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.