Culture Quotes

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

More people write poetry than read it.

My plea is for banishing the English language as a cultural usurper, as we successfully banished the political rule of the English usurper.

There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.

Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers, as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. 'Tis king against king. It is ever a romance of history in all dynasties--the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb.

The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.

Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account.

They have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.

The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.

Therefore, we must not look at the African people, even before they met whites, as if they had something unique, which was not to be found in other societies.

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.

Character is the backbone of our human culture. Music is the flowering of character.

The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

The English love an insult. It's their only test of a man's sincerity.

America is a country of young men.

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

I'm not interested in more political or cultural combat.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

The needs of a society determine its ethics.

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.

If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other. Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

The first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC.

Paris is the fountain-head of European civilisation, as Gomukhi is of the Ganga.

I think the music reflects the state that the society is in. It doesn't suggest the state. I think the poets and musicians and artists are of the age - not only do they lead the age on, but they also reflect that age. [...] Like The Beatles. We came out of Liverpool and we reflected our background and we reflected our thoughts in what we sang, and that's all people are doing.

Those aren't the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.

Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice... they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

I do not wish my house to be walled and my windows stuffed. I want all cultures to blow freely through my dwelling.

It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.

History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them. [...] Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.

If you're making a time capsule you have to throw my album in there.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.

It hurts me to think that people in their rush for everything modern despise all their ancient traditions and ignore them in their lives.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.

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