Quotes About Culture

A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.

The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt

If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

The stock image of the early twentieth century, the "Negro" minstrel, a rural simpleton, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich notes, has now been upgraded, whitened, and continued in such television programs as Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Culturally speaking, the entire North had "cut in" and seemed to move the South to the back of the line, even as—and this was forgotten—federal dollars had steadily moved from North to South.

601If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

The distinction between artefact and organism dissolved in a Petri dish.

un traje decente, una taza de café, al teatro los sábados y a los conciertos los domingos de primavera.

Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.

History teaches us that when a barbarian race confronts a sleeping culture, the barbarian always wins.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

In some ways England is more liberal than France, but I also find it more intrusive. But when you go abroad you have to accept the ways of where you live. I have to respect that.

Their diet is basically boiled vegetables, fish and rice. No fat, no sugar. You notice when you live there that there are no fat people.

The eyes of the Armenians speak long before the lips move and long after they cease to.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

His column explaining Thanksgiving to the French when he wrote for the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune there. --bb

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques.

Knowing our weakness, dividing leaders on both the left and right seek power and fame by setting American against American, brother against brother, compatriot against compatriot. These leaders assert that we must choose sides, then argue that the other side is wicked—not worthy of any consideration—rather than challenging them to listen to others with kindness and respect. They foster a culture of contempt.

That's because you Westerners see art as being created from nothing. In the East, we believe the art already exists, and our job is simply to reveal it. It is not visible because we add something, but because we take away the parts that are not the art.

North American civilization is one of the ugliest to have emerged in human history, and it has engulfed the world. Asphalt and exhaust fumes clog the villages…. This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see… the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the globe.

Paris is an unsolved puzzle. She inspires me in a way that other places don't. And she demands more of me. Just try to write about her without bumping into cliche after cliche.