Quotes About Culture

To be born in Kentucky is a heritage; to brag about it is a habit; to appreciate it is a virtue.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.

The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.

The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.

Both the counterculture and its younger twin, postmodernism, then, are a rebellion against culture and art seen as autonomous, secular human activities. It is now felt, quite correctly, that these activities have been emptied of all spiritual substance even while continuing to claim a quasi-sacred mission.

Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

The Odessan is the polar opposite of the Petrogradian. As a rule, Odessans make a killing in Petrograd.

I don't study literature, I read it for enjoyment

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

Write what should not be forgotten.

I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day.

People instantly assume you can't have a platonic friendship with someone of the opposite sex. I think this may be specific to L.A. - or America.

I study life by being close to it, this "native life" about which so little is known, and which is so disfigured by the descriptions of those who, not knowing it, insist on describing it anyway.