Quotes About Culture

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

No one in France has that accent. No one has a French accent like that, except on TV, when English actors show that they are French by speaking English in a French accent that no French person ever actually uses. But we have come to accept that. We want Hercule Poirot because it sounds intelligent and travelled and cultured and everything that we're not, British or Asian.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

To a degree that would be astonishing in the United States, Vietnamese in all walks of life could recite long passages from poems, recount folktales and legends, and discuss novels thirty years old as if the characters lived next door.

In the four years I had spent in Southeast Asia, I had changed, and so had the people back home. And I could not communicate effectively about these differences in perception.

Look, you're not French, let's face it . . . and who wants to be, anyway, in this day and age? Being French is way past cool.

MAN 3 . . . fuck, I'm glad I'm a guy! You know? MAN 5 Yeah, why's that? Pause. MAN 3 . . . because then I don't have to date 'em.

I saw that it was plain wrong to evaluate people according to race, for it was clear that culture was the real divider among peoples.

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of "crap.

We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.

Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.

We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.