Culture Quotes

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.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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.

Eric Gill

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

Samuel Butler

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Thomas Carlyle

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Oscar Wilde

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

Henry Van Dyke

Even in cultures where marriages are arranged by parents, you're never actually forbidden to fall in love with your mate.

Orson Scott Card

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

Mahatma Gandhi

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

Orson Scott Card

Most people in America want an easy read. I call it McFiction - books which pass right through you without you even digesting them. I don't mean a book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture.

Jodi Picoult

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.

Albert Camus

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

Leo Tolstoy

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Sc

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.

Allan Bloom

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

Hermann Goering