Quotes about Culture

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's plan in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.