Quotes About Culture

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another.

A collision between an ancient mind and a modern world (evolutionary psychology).

But we must never feel – personally or as a culture – that only one version of the future is inevitable. The future is ours to shape.

Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion.

But this was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity.

se la nostra ansia è in parte un prodotto della cultura, allora possiamo modificarla cambiando le nostre reazioni nei confronti di quella stessa cultura.

My dad was Jewish. My mom is not. So I was not raised anything.

Who you come from is part of who you are. How do you just let that be stolen from you?

For those wishing to vacation abroad, the agency could recommend destinations that were relatively free of local race prejudice and, just as important, not overrun by white American tourists—for nothing was more frustrating than traveling thousands of miles only to encounter the same bigots you dealt with every day at home.

The pride of the hipster food movement is sort of annoying, but it fascinates me.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

we live in a country where people believe implicitly in their right to bore the living shit out of absolutely everybody within haranguing distance with tales of their miserable, lonely, and inevitably self-deluding searches for personal fulfillment in the emotional desert that is our crass commercial culture.

America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on.

In his book, Cohen referenced an old joke: What do pro wrestling and the U.S. Senate have in common? Both are dominated by overweight white guys pretending to hurt each other. He said, "The intellectual level of cable news is one step above pro wrestling." Cohen wrote that over a decade ago. Today the news is at the level of pro wrestling. This is one reason we have a WWE performer in the White House.

one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There's no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates.

smartass ice heathens from the north descended upon small-town America to laugh at the superstitious but numerically superior yokels of the heartland. In a breathtakingly accurate preview of things to come, the yokels actually won the trial, but history judged them the losers—thanks mainly to the flamboyant propaganda of a godless misanthrope named H. L. Mencken, the brilliant Darwinian ancestor of the modern liberal media.

Whereas the studies that preceded it focused on poor rural whites, who may or may not have been of mixed racial descent, Mongrel Virginians concerned itself with a small mixed-population group in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of western Virginia that Estabrook dubbed the Win (White-Indian-Negro) tribe.

social sanitation

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.