Quotes About Culture

Wearing a headband doesn't make you an Indian. Looking like a weed doesn't make you organic.

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture...have simply made us all members of one class.

The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

my Clodius, how little your countrymen know of the true versatility of a Pericles, of the true witcheries of an Aspasia!

It is always unsafe to detach a custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.

do not think I have ever met with a single fact which seems to me to justify the theory, of which Dr. von Martius is perhaps the leading advocate, that the ordinary condition of the savage is the result of degeneration from a far higher state.

degeneration has been rather of a local than of a general character,

So you got the cool New Yorkers, and then there are the less-than-cool New Yorkers.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

The cliché has it that an unknown subject is a closed book, but Egypt was different. Egypt was an open book, with illustrations on every page, that no one knew how to read.

Sicilians never forget and they never forgive. This is a truth you must always keep in mind.

Ah, the Irish. We're a hopeless lot.

Foster's–Australian for beer.

Top people take The Times.

Full of Eastern promise.

I love New York.

I'd like to welcome the pommy bastard to God's own earth, and I'd like to remind him that we don't like stuck-up sticky-beaks here.

Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture.

Black is beautiful.

Safety isn't just a slogan, it's a way of life.