Cultural Capital Quotes

VanessaPlace Inc. is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. What is poetry really worth? What is poetry's purpose - personally, culturally, politically, financially? VanessaPlace offers a language-based solution to these and other dilemmas facing the culture business today. The poetry-products of VanessaPlace turn cultural capital into capitalized culture through a game-changing, dynamic shift of focus from manifesto to manifestation. ~ Vanessa Place

To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life. ~ Susan T. Fiske

You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it's your family, peers, or co-workers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you. (205) ~ Tanner Colby

One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital. ~ Ron Chernow

...this midlevel cultural-capital audience is not as far from the average white pop critic as we might have expected. We usually make middling incomes or worse, and while most have university degrees, our expertise is usually more self-taught than PhD-certified, a pattern believed would produce an anxious, fact-hoarding intellectual style in contrast with the relaxed mastery of a fully legitimated cultural elite. ~ Carl Wilson

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages. ~ David Dinkins

In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as "misrecognition." Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual's hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children. ~ You Yenn Teo

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. ~ Susan Jacoby

The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so. ~ Tom Vanderbilt

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. ~ Owen Jones

the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the "era of mass [book] reading" was a brief "anomaly" in our intellectual history: "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class." The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the "power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital" or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of "an increasingly arcane hobby. ~ Anonymous

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world? ~ Robert Wilson

Content that's generated out of America, whether it be film or music, has, in my opinion, much greater impact in sustaining our credibility and our place as a cultural capital. This is our great export. ~ Lyor Cohen

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. ~ Madison Smartt Bell

The cultural capital American Christianity has amassed simply cannot be leveraged where it matters most. ~ James Davison Hunter

Capital in money form has no citizenship. It is fungible, an asset capable of moving from place to place in a nanosecond. ~ Eric Kierans

If we use our fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful, and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations. The heat of the sun's rays represents an immense amount of energy vastly in excess of waterpower ... The sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land ... ~ Nikola Tesla

The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Few things in cultural programming in the mass media are quite as disturbing as watching Charlie Rose leaning forward, craning out over his table, peering deeply, on the very precipice of an incisive question sure to reveal a real Idea, a slim, almost excited smile starting to form on his lips as he imagines the dawning joy of the intellectual life revealed for himself and his audience, and we move with the camera, oh-so-sincerely, to his guest and see that all this expectation and anticipation is addressed to ... Lance Armstrong. Or Ron "Opie" Howard. Or Gary Shandling ... .. ~ Curtis White

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet. ~ Jose Saramago

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

If the executioner goes, my package will never be made public. If he doesn't go, it will be made public exactly fifty years from the day the bill for a moratorium on capital punishment is defeated. ~ Caryl Chessman

Miami ... the floating-human-body-parts capital of America. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I was born to a woman I never knew and raised by another who took in orphans. I do not know my background, my lineage, my biological or cultural heritage. But when I meet someone new, I treat them with respect ... For after all, they could be my people. ~ James A. Michener

Rock, for all the power of its individual dreams, is still confined by its mass cultural form. Its history, like the history of America itself, is a history of class struggle--the struggle for fun. ~ Simon Frith

To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity
be it art, music, literature, or science
is the way it enriches our lives. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

Tattoos are a right of passage. They're a marker of bravery, of maturity, of cultural acceptance. The tattoo represents not only a willingness to accept pain - to endure it - but a need to actively embrace it. Because life is painful - beautiful but painful ... ~ Nicola Barker

Bruce Smith is a tender master of music, and beautiful lines, and complex thoughts, and fascinating wild personal and cultural references. ~ Gerald Stern

When capital owners are few, the private-property conduits of necessity create vast savings reservoirs for those few. If there were many owners, the same conduits would broadly irrigate the economy with purchasing power. ~ Louis O. Kelso

A quiet mind is one that is willing to speak the truth that is felt internally. It is a mind that has not yet been conditioned to accept a reality that is being imposed upon it by well-meaning adults and cultural and religious teachings. ~ Wayne Dyer

Most astonishing of all to the citizens of Constantinople, however, was the emperor's habit of wandering in disguise through the streets of the capital, questioning those he met about their concerns and ensuring that merchants were charging fair prices for their wares. Once a week, accompanied by the blare of trumpets, he would ride from one end of the city to the other, encouraging any who had complaints to seek him out. Those who stopped him could be certain of a sympathetic ear no matter how powerful their opponent. One story tells of a widow who approached the emperor and made the startling claim that the very horse he was riding had been stolen from her by a senior magistrate of the city. Theophilus dutifully looked into the matter, and when he discovered that the widow was correct, he had the magistrate flogged and told his watching subjects that justice was the greatest virtue of a ruler.* ~ Lars Brownworth

By treating patients like customers, as nurse Amy Bozeman pointed out in a Scrubs magazine article, hospitals succumb to the ingrained cultural notion that the customer is always right. "Now we are told as nurses that our patients are customers, and that we need to provide excellent service so they will maintain loyalty to our hospitals," Bozeman wrote. "The patient is NOT always right. They just don't have the knowledge and training." Some hospitals have hired "customer service representatives," but empowering these nonmedical employees to pander to patients' whims can backfire. Comfort is not always the same thing as healthcare. As Bozeman suggested, when representatives give warm blankets to feverish patients or complimentary milk shakes to patients who are not supposed to eat, and nurses take them away, patients are not going to give high marks to the nurses. ~ Alexandra Robbins

Capital," cried Basil. "I could eat a stag, antlers and all. I say they they do make a wonderful nosebag for us wounded heroes, y'know. ~ Brian Jacques

The real survivors are the Earth inhabitants that have lived millions of years without consuming their ecological capital, the base from which all abundance flows. ~ Janine Benyus

Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible. ~ Robin Flower

People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated. ~ Marge Piercy

Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country ... with hope and delight. ~ Louis Auchincloss

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play. ~ Garry Kasparov

Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand. ~ Bob Barr

I was a chief justice. And before that, I was a district court judge, handled major felonies, including capital murder cases; and I handled major civil litigation. ~ Louie Gohmert

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made. ~ Richard Handler

My hope is to get young people to think about ways that they can translate hip-hop's great cultural movement into political power that can change the conditions for America's young, so that young people upon graduating from high school who don't have economic means to go to college can realize other options beyond joining the military and fighting in wars that enrich corporations like Halliburton which should feel guilty about profiteering off of a war that is being fought on the backs of those locked out of America's mainstream economy. ~ Bakari Kitwana

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world - the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular. ~ Minae Mizumura

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll. ~ David Simon

Morals, including especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a creation of man's reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution - runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including 'socialist'). The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialist.
One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialist diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligence reflection, and still more appropriate design and 'rational coordination' of our undertakings. This leads one to be favorably disposed to the central e ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries ... What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

...large technologies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy... ~ Safiya Umoja Noble