Quotes About Culture

It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.

Most writers in older lands despaired of being understood by those who had not lived their language.

Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.

American Nihilism is a mood; a mood of moodiness; a vague disquiet. It is Nihilism without the abyss.

students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.

Rock and the intellectual Left must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited. The critical theory of late capitalism is at once late capitalisms subtlest and crudest expression. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.

Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux [as Rock music]. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art.

The distance from the contemporary and its high seriousness that students most need in order not to indulge their petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves cannot be found in the cinema, which now only knows the present.

Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. But very quickly culturewhich was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singularbecame cultures.

Television enters not only the room, but also the tastes of old and young alike, appealing to the immediately pleasant and subverting whatever does not conform to it.

The distinction between the world of commerce and that of culture quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter.

Male experience is what patriarchal culture uses to represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it.

The more powerful a woman is under patriarchy, the more 'unsexed' she becomes in the eyes of others as her female cultural identity recedes beneath the mantle of male-identified power and the masculine images associated with it. With men the effect is just the opposite: the more powerful they are, the more aware they are of their manhood. In other words, in a patriarchal culture, power looks sexy on men but not on women.

In our culture it is a woman's body which is considered important while it is a man's mind or his activities which are valued. A woman is sexy. A man is successful.

The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correction run amok.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

She'd absolutely adored the library_an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.

and then Zach said a really bad word, but I doubt DeeDee noticed because it was in Farsi

Mom's Israeli. Dad's Brazilian. What can I say? I am Embassy Row personified. You really lucked out in the best friend department

She'd absolutely adored the library-an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.

MTV will lead us to believe that the B word has become a term of endearment or slang among equals, but I still mainly think of it as the insult of choice for the inarticulate.

She draped her arm through mine, and, as we walked, I was sure she probably looked chic and cool and European. I felt slow and clumsy and American.

There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile.