Culture
» “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.”
– Mao Zedong
» ”Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.”
– Thomas Wolfe
» ”Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.”
– Edith Wharton
» ”Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.”
– Simone Weil
» ”The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please.”
– Amerigo Vespucci
» ”For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”
– Jonathan Swift
» ”We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”
– George Steiner
» ”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.”
– Pablo Picasso
» ”All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
– Camille Paglia
» ”Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.”
– Jawaharlal Nehru
» ”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.”
– Henry Miller
» ”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.”
– Malcolm Mclaren
» ”A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”
– Mary Mccarthy
» ”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.”
– Karl Marx
» ”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.”
– Herbert Marcuse
» ”Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ”retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.”
– Jean Fran
