Quotes about Culture

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a literary salon; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Few things discover the state of the arts amongst people more certainly than the presents that are made to them by foreigners.

Superstitions and eccentric habits are a Western substitute for actual idols.

But the point is that we live in a culture that idolizes happiness, and if we idolize happiness, it will always elude us.

Why do you think Adam and Eve were concerned about uncovered genitals, but not bare arms, legs, noses, or ears?

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, in solid cash, the tribute which Philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Italy during Shakespeare's time had citizens of all cultures and colors. To pretend that it did not is ignorance. And I don't waste my time on ignorance.

Growing up in England, of course you do absorb certain ways the royals wave their hands and carry themselves.