Quotes About Cultural shift

Regardless of our political stance, we cannot afford to perpetuate the Western car-centric model.

I was born in the '50s - 1951. So I grew up during that part of the '50s when everything was supposed to be at its best in America, they claimed, and then eased into the '60s.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

I don't think coolness used to be such a commodity among adults. And now it is.

There's a lot of concern that London is changing and artists are being forced to move to new areas.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can't say three words without cursing. And I don't think that's right.

I was in college in the '60s, and the whole feminist movement had swept me up.

I don't know how much the economy has changed since Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.'

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

This is the problem today. Men and women have switched places. The woman now acts more like the man.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

Stone is replaced by concrete, literature is replaced by journalism, journalism is replaced by information, man is replaced by woman, man and woman are replaced by robots, robots are replaced by cyborgs, and maybe humanity is replaced by post-humanity or trans humanity, i do think replacement is central to the modern society.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the same young musicians who stood in awe of Bill Monroe were about to push him, and others like him, off the stage. Rock 'n' roll began to take the youth audience away from country music. And that was a disaster.

Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement 'I am an important person', but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.

organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

At this point, at least in the United States, it appears that our cultural meaning has pretty much shrunk down to this: it is all about winning. Then, once you win, it becomes all about consuming. I can discern no other underlying philosophy in the practical order of American life today. Of itself, such a worldview cannot feed the soul very well or very long, much less provide meaning and encouragement, or engender love or community.

When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.

There's no more education, no more culture - if culture depends on a commonly understood history - and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There's War.