Famous Quotes about Culture (45 Quotations)

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator — the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio — empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how — has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home — within the family, so to speak — our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It's become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.

The acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.

The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, ''culture.'' It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ''art'' to defend their collapsing culture.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.