Quotes About Culture

We need to teach our kids, because there is such a celebrity culture at the moment, that however rich you are, however famous you are, however glamorous you are, everyone has to live by the same rules.

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.

It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist.

here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.

Today's supporters of religious censorship claim that they are different. They say they are not advocating censorship because they believe we must bow down before Church and state, but because we must respect different cultures and say nothing that might offend them.

They did not say that it was Afrikaanophobic to be judgemental about religion, or explain that it was imperialist to criticise the beliefs of 'the other'. If a religion was oppressive or a culture repugnant, one had a duty to offend it.

The Germanic tone… it's very calm yet quietly confident. I bet Germans were really cool, whoever they were back on Earth. They sound peaceful and meditative.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

Brian was constantly looking for topics that kids could relate to. Even though he was dealing in the most advanced score-charts and arrangements, he was still incredibly conscious of this commercial thing. This absolute need to relate.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

Radical feminists and evolutionists agree that males are a serious cost to society.

Reading about Japan in the West is often like looking at a funhouse mirror through a kaleidoscope.

Lily did have her .22 holstered under her toggle coat, which unnerved Bryan. He was a flatlander originally--a Masshole, even--so always seemed vaguely panicked at the very concept of a well-regulated liberal.

Notable for being light on applause, whoopin', hollerin' and standing ovations, Japanese concerts generally start at six in the evening. The reason for this, we're told, is that public transport stops early, people live outside the city and it is too difficult for them to make two journeys.

The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.

It's funny, growing up there was never anybody around me with any kind of artistic bent.

Everybody hated the Chinese, and the Chinese, ever willing to oblige, reciprocated.

America was a land of machines, and it was through machines, the miraculous handmaidens of mob culture, that the muses of illiteracy brought America her voice and vision during the years of the immigrants' waves. Centuries ago, movable type had given literacy to the common man. Now, through these wondrous newer machines, he would give it back.

You can forget Proust and those stupid cakes. Beatles' songs are more potent.

They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.

You speak very good English for an American.

She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster.

My mother's soul was still Norwegian in a way that mine was not.