Quotes About Culture

Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.

I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.

Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.

Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said. "No work would be possible without coffee." They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.

Paris is well worth a Mass.

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

Proximity to this death makes me nostalgic for the French language.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.

There is only one test of any political scheme or adventure in government. It is the quality of the human being produced by the political order and by the way of life occasioned by that order.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood-- Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good. Oh! the roast beef of England. And Old England's roast beef.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

The republic of letters.

We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.