Quotes About Culture

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

Popularity's overrated.

there's nothing like Latin for slapping the fuck out of people who think they're better than you. I've used it several times to good effect.

Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London,

Na ja, bei ihm heißt Chard 'Phallus Impudicus', und ..." [...] "Er heißt 'unzüchtiger Pimmel'?

She felt as though she'd suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present.

the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...

Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They

Would I call myself English?' he mused aloud. 'No, I'd probably say British.

Rubenfeld spoke no Hebrew. His mind was racing to come up with something—anything—that these wild-eyed dirt farmers would understand. He threw his arms in the air and yelled the only Yiddish words he could think of. "Gefilte fish! Gefilte fish! Shabbes! Shabbes!

So how can you say Jazz started in whorehouses when the musicianers didn't have no real need for them?

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture.

Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.

The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism.

In 1980, the cost of an average American wedding, adjusted for inflation, was $11,000, a princely sum in most parts of the world even today. But by 2014, that figure had escalated to $30,000, and in Manhattan the average wedding now costs more than $76,000.1

Latin America evolved as a collection of imperial viceroyalties and subdivisions, established and maintained by an overseas empire. For 300 years an often impenetrable geography of mountains, deserts, jungles and huge distances divided these units of empire, ensuring their evolution into different city-based states united by culture but each with their own particular history, racial mix and different interests.

Allen Ginsberg had the idea that the image in a blues refrain was the American haiku.

Every great artist is a man who has freed himself . . . Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a "universal" without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.