Selected culture quotes

1. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

2. Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

3. If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

4. Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

5. The portions of a woman which appeal to man's depravity Are constructed with considerable care.

6. Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

7. Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

8. Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.

9. One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.

10. This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity-for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race. (13th February 1945)

11. The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

12. I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.

13. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

14. The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

15. For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.

16. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

17. Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.

18. I didn't say that the Jews are inferior. I didn't even maintain they are a race. I merely saw that the mixture of different cultures didn't work.

19. The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.

20. Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.

21. During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

22. It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

23. Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

24. Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky.

25. To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.

26. I know no place at which an Englishman may drop down suddenly among a pleasanter circle of acquaintance, or find himself with a more clever set of men, than he can do at Boston.

27. The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

28. Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

29. Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

30. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

31. I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

32. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

33. History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

34. I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!

35. The body expresses our very being. The striving for beauty is inborn among the Aryan.

36. To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.

37. Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

38. I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

39. I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.

40. The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

41. For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

42. When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

43. If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

44. Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

45. The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth.

46. A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

47. Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

48. Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.

49. Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

50. We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.

51. Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

52. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

53. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

54. All advertising advertises advertising.

55. The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

56. Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

57. What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

58. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

59. I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

60. Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.

61. Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

62. Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.

63. The Sixties, of course, was the worst time in the world to try and bring up a child. They were exposed to all these crazy things going on.

64. I don't want to live in a culture of despair. I'd like to live in a culture of hope.

65. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

66. In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.

67. There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.

68. Maybe our generation is more about sex, but it feels like romance is dying out.

69. The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

70. The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

71. Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.

72. The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

73. You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

74. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

75. The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.

76. Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity.

77. But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.

78. What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.

79. The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

80. If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

81. And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm in them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

82. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life.

83. Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

84. Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.

85. The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.

86. I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?

87. Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

88. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

89. It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.

90. I want to give people a taste of the Caribbean, and show them the fun side of me.

91. In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

92. Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

93. One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.

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

95. In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

96. If the religious leaders have influence, they will not permit girls and boys to wrestle together, as recently happened in Shiraz.

97. They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.

98. Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.

99. Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

100. Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it.