Cultural Elite Quotes

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite. ~ Dan Quayle

I'm not part of the cultural elite. I'm a down-home girl. Always have been, always will be. ~ Lauren Hutton

...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

I would never call myself cultural elite, but you might be cultural elite. ~ Adam McKay

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe. ~ Peter L. Berger

The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies - leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness. ~ Peter L. Berger

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was "pure": there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today's triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham's infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins. ~ Paul Bowles

From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless. ~ Gordon Smith

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

I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production. ~ Liam Gillick

You guys know about vampires? ... You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn't see myself reflected at all. I was like, "Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don't exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it. ~ Junot Diaz

The Christian worldview, contra-postmodernism, understands language not as a Self-referential, merely human and ultimately arbitrary system of signs that is reducible to contingent cultural factors, but it has the gift of a rational God entrusted to beings made in his own image and likeness. ~ Douglas Groothuis

Was my sense of being in love not just the result of living in a particular cultural epoch? Was it not society, rather than any authentic urge, that was motivating me to pride myself on romantic love? In previous cultures and ages, would I not have been taught to ignore my feelings for Chloe in the way I was now taught to ignore (more or less) the impulse to wear stockings or to respond to insult with a challenge to a duel? "Some ~ Alain De Botton

You are the most powerful cultural force in the world. ~ William J. Clinton

Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature. ~ Will Tuttle

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself. ~ Robert Wright

The sexual revolution produced cultural convulsions that were unparalleled in the 20th century. The female sex was historically sexualized and required to have orgasms for the first time. Sexual "deviants," particularly homosexuals, achieved partial emancipation. ~ Volkmar Sigusch

No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed. ~ S. Alice Callahan

There have now been many studies of elite performers - international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth - and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they've had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. ~ Atul Gawande

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow. ~ Joseph Brodsky

I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role. ~ Kevin Hart

Here's an easy way to see if a war movie is being truthful: If you see an explosion on a faraway hillside and the sound of the explosion and the detonation of the bomb happen at the same time - if they're putting the sound and the vision together in the same moment - they're going toward our cultural understanding of war, not the reality of war. ~ Sebastian Junger

I was bred and raised in a multi-cultural music background. ~ Coco Lee

Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future. ~ Elena Conis

Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other-only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly. ~ Talcott Parsons

Not only would I say that the family is important for the evangelization of the new world. The family is important, and it is necessary for the survival of humanity. Without the family, the cultural survival of the human race would be at risk. The family, whether we like it or not, is the foundation. ~ Pope Francis

We both grew up in the atmosphere of struggle, both Ossie and me, ... I come out of Harlem and Harlem comes out of me - wailing police sirens and street parties, rumors and landlords, that cultural, spiritual scene. And Ossie came up from the South, where struggle and dying were part of everyday life. That is who we are. ~ Ruby Dee

This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness. ~ Nick Joaquin

When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.

Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others. ~ Rick Revelle

We were born into a peace of plenty, a pleasure-economy, a bonobo masturbation society. The future that our elite handlers have in store for us advertises more of the same. More detached pleasure, less risk, freedom from want, more masturbation. ~ Jack Donovan

The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite. ~ Vilfredo Pareto

Many Japanese kids don't express themselves. They would rather express themselves in a fantasy world and through passive-agressive behavior. They go on behavior strike, they go into emotional shutdown. This is one of the ways of expressing a Japanese way of life. But in acting this way, these children are simply mirroring the behavior they see among adult Japanese, especially those from elite or privileged backgrounds. ~ Michael Zielenziger

The giant neon spinning discs are a reminder of the huge role that Sam Sniderman and his store played in the cultural life of Toronto and I believe they should be preserved and remounted in the interests of our city's heritage. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

[Prostitution laws] are a way of reminding men that their sexuality is necessarily monstrous, that it creates victims and destroys lives. Because masculine sexuality must remain criminalized, dangerous, antisocial, and threatening. This is not an inherent truth, it's a cultural construction. When whores are prevents from working in decent conditions, women are not the only ones being targeted, men's sexuality is also being controlled. Having a relaxed heterosexual fuck when they feel like it mustn't be too easy or pleasant. Their sexuality must remain a problem. ~ Virginie Despentes

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking. ~ Camille Paglia

As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels. ~ Jared Diamond