Quote: 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. Author: Matthew Arnold 1822-1888, British Poet, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Matthew Arnold 1822-1888, British Poet, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Jean Baudrillard French Postmodern Philosopher, Writer
Quote: That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all. Author: Henry Ward Beecher 1813-1887, American Preacher, Orator, Writer
Quote: The acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty. Author: Jesse Bennett 1769-1842, American Physician
Quote: 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. Author: Carl Bernstein 1944-, American Journalist, writer
Quote: 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. Author: Allan Bloom 1930-1992, American Educator, Author
Quote: General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming. Author: William Bolitho 1890-1930, British Author
Quote: 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. Author: Daniel J. Boorstin 1914-, American Historian
Quote: A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand. Author: Samuel Butler 1612-1680, British Poet, Satirist
Quote: Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny. Author: Albert Camus 1913-1960, French Existential Writer
Quote: 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. Author: Albert Camus 1913-1960, French Existential Writer
Quote: 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. Author: Jean Dubuffet 1901-1985, French Sculptor, Painter
Quote: Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why. Author: Henry Van Dyke 1852--1933, American Protestant Clergyman and Writer
Quote: In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. Author: T. S. Eliot 1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic
Quote: Culture is one thing and varnish is another. Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist
Quote: It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable. Author: Northrop Frye 1912-1991, Canadian Literary Critic
Quote: Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart. Author: Mahatma Gandhi 1869-1948, Indian Political, Spiritual Leader
Quote: No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Author: Mahatma Gandhi 1869-1948, Indian Political, Spiritual Leader
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. Author: Eric Gill 1882-1940, British Sculptor, Engraver, Writer, Typographer
Quote: Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver. Author: Hermann Goering 1893-1946, Nazi Politico-Military Leader
Quote: 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. Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist
Quote: 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. Author: George Grosz
Quote: 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. Author: S. I. Hayakawa 1902-1992, Canadian Born American Senator, Educator
Quote: One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. Author: Pauline Kael 1919-, American Film Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Karl Kraus 1874-1936, Austrian Satirist
Quote: 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. Author: Milan Kundera 1929-, Czech Author, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Walter Lippmann 1889-1974, American Journalist
Quote: 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. Author: Jean Frantois Lyotard 1924-, French Philosopher
Quote: 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. Author: Herbert Marcuse 1898-1979, German Political Philosopher
Quote: 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. Author: Karl Marx 1818-1883, German Political Theorist, Social Philosopher
Quote: 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. Author: Mary Mccarthy 1912-1989, American Author, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Malcolm Mclaren
Quote: 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. Author: Henry Miller 1891-1980, American Author
Quote: Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. Author: Jawaharlal Nehru 1889-1964, Indian Nationalist, Statesman
Quote: 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! Author: Camille Paglia 1947-, American Author, Critic, Educator
Quote: 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. Author: Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Spanish Artist
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. Author: George Steiner 1929-, French-born American Critic, Novelist
Quote: 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. Author: Jonathan Swift 1667-1745, Anglo-Irish Satirist
Quote: The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please. Author: Amerigo Vespucci 1454-1512, Italian Explorer Who Discovered America
Quote: Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers. Author: Simone Weil 1910-1943, French Philosopher, Mystic
Quote: Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone. Author: Edith Wharton 1862-1937, American Author
Quote: Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. Author: Thomas Wolfe 1931-, American Author, Journalist
Quote: 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. Author: Mao Zedong 1893-1976, Founder of Chinese Communist State