Quotes about culture

"Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture."

Abbott, John on culture   

"Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances."

Arnold, Matthew on culture   

"Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit."

Arnold, Matthew on culture   

"Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers -- and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic."

Baudrillard, Jean on culture   

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

Beecher, Henry Ward on culture   

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

Bennett, Jesse on culture   

"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."

Bernstein, Carl on culture   

"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."

Bloom, Allan on culture   

"General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming."

Bolitho, William on culture   

"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."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on culture   

"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand."

Butler, Samuel on culture   

"Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny."

Camus, Albert on culture   

"Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future."

Camus, Albert on culture   

"What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers."

Dubuffet, Jean on culture   

"Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why."

Dyke, Henry Van on culture   

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

Eliot, T. S. on culture
5 fans of this quote   

"Culture is one thing and varnish is another."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on culture   

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

Frye, Northrop on culture   

"Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart."

Gandhi, Mahatma on culture
6 fans of this quote   

"No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive."

Gandhi, Mahatma on culture
5 fans of this quote   

"Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building -- like Tower Bridge -- or a classical front put on a steel frame -- like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living -- not something added, like sugar on a pill."

Gill, Eric on culture   

"Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver."

Goering, Hermann on culture   

"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."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on culture   

"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."

Grosz, George on culture   

"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."

Hayakawa, S. I. on culture   

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

Kael, Pauline on culture   

"Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former."

Kraus, Karl on culture   

"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."

Kundera, Milan on culture   

"Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization."

Lippmann, Walter on culture   

"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."

Lyotard, Jean Francois on culture   

"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."

Marcuse, Herbert on 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."

Marx, Karl on culture   

"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."

Mccarthy, Mary on culture   

"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."

Mclaren, Malcolm on culture   

"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."

Miller, Henry on culture   

"Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit."

Nehru, Jawaharlal on culture   

"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!"

Paglia, Camille on culture   

"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."

Picasso, Pablo on culture
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Steiner, George on culture   

"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."

Swift, Jonathan on culture