High Culture Quotes

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don't belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone's right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border ha ~ Milan Kundera

You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have to believe in the values of high culture. Not just high culture but middle culture, low culture, kinds of exciting eye-catching crap of all kinds. Everyone needs that. ~ Francis Spufford

The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism. ~ Ori Gersht

High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within a traversable distance, they sit and work alone. ~ Philip Gilbert Hamerton

If you believe that a nation is really better off which achieves for a comparative few, those who are capable of attaining it, high culture, ease, opportunity, and that these few from their enlightenment should give what they consider best to those less favored, then you naturally belong to the Republican Party. But if you believe that people must struggle slowly to the light for themselves, then it seems to me that you are a Democrat. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies....you are far more likely to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies -- think of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar or his Dark Knight Trilogy -- than in any European art-house ~ Sohrab Ahmari

It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different constructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course - to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment. If we ask whose ideas were the seeds of the dominant ethic and shared hopes of contemporary humanity, whose resulted in the most material advancement in history, whose were the first of their kind and today enjoy the most emulation, then in that sense the Enlightenment, despite the erosion of its original vision and despite the shakiness of some of its premises, has been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world. ~ Edward O. Wilson

This may appear as a counterintuitive choice: not only is the city the undisputed stronghold of Japanese traditional high culture, but also its residents' more mundane practices are widely regarded as highly distinctive. Yet still, not everything that occurs in that city is typically Kyotoite, or typically Japanese. ~ Christoph Brumann

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world
high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud
"I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time
negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. ~ Mark Leyner

The Greek culture of the Sophists had developed out of all the Greek instincts; it belongs to the culture of the Periclean age as necessarily as Plato does not: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old philosophy; it finds expression in, e.g., the high culture of Thucydides. And – it has ultimately shown itself to be right: every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists – Our contemporary way of thinking is to a great extent Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean: it suffices to say it is Protagorean, because Protagoras represented a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing. ~ Robert Lane Greene

Even if there is no connection between diversity and international influence, some people would argue that immigration brings cultural enrichment. This may seem to be an attractive argument, but the culture of Americans remains almost completely untouched by millions of Hispanic and Asian immigrants. They may have heard of Cinco de Mayo or Chinese New Year, but unless they have lived abroad or have studied foreign affairs, the white inhabitants of Los Angeles are likely to have only the most superficial knowledge of Mexico or China despite the presence of many foreigners.
Nor is it immigrants who introduce us to Cervantes, Puccini, Alexander Dumas, or Octavio Paz. Real high culture crosses borders by itself, not in the back pockets of tomato pickers, refugees, or even the most accomplished immigrants. What has Yo-Yo Ma taught Americans about China? What have we learned from Seiji Ozawa or Ichiro about Japan? Immigration and the transmission of culture are hardly the same thing. Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company, but that does not require Italian immigrants.
Miami is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic, but what, in the way of authentic culture enrichment, has this brought the city? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by diversity? Has the culture of Detroit benefited from a majority-black population? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why do whites move out of those very parts of t ~ Jared Taylor

Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do."

So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how. ~ Alan Jacobs

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties. ~ Neal Ascherson

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition. ~ Roger Scruton

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so ... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games. ~ Haruki Murakami

Mathematical high culture collides with pop culture and all hell breaks loose! Harris takes us on a wild ride
never a dull moment! ~ Gregory Chaitin

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artis ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

You want everything for your kids that you didn't have, but that that very desire can pollute and corrupt the good, basic American pluckiness, resourcefulness and down-to-earthness that we like to pride ourselves with, and result in aspirations of wealth and high culture. ~ Todd Haynes

In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave. ~ Herbert Marcuse

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from. ~ Fran Lebowitz

The acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question or draw attention to this fact is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art "too literally," and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses. This is of course maintained within a world - a cultural and academic world - which is dominated by male power and, often unconscious, patriarchal attitudes. In Utopia - that is to say, in a world in which the power structure was such that both men and women equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any subconscious implications of dominance or submission - in a world of total and, so to speak, unconscious equality, the female nude would not be problematic. In our world, it is. ~ Linda Nochlin

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ... ~ Milan Kundera

Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

1. A question is a prayer to one's self.
2. Wars prove that the past will destroy the future.
3. The heart of darkness will bestow either holiness or madness. A voice from the depths of the gloomy loneliness of the soul will bestow an amazing observer philosophy.
4. Abstract transformations of chance prove that there is no order and will not even be in high culture.
5. The heart of reality beats in the rhythm of verses and music of beatniks, endless improvisations of opinions are like gloomy but romantic apathy of jazz - these are timid steps to the truth, as if connecting usb wires of the logic of various people, we are connected to eternity in eternal unity, we learn the common self of humanity. Exhaling cigarette smoke looking into the future with black glasses, fear that does not see terror in our eyes, he sees through glasses only courage and courage where we seem to take the last leap into the abyss of inevitability. A ray of light hits in the distance, we go to the end from dawn to dawn, snapping our fingers, we go to the climax of truth coming out of the fog of self-deception, breathing in the air of freedom from illusions, we where there are no screens of annoying instincts and other vices of self-destruction.
6. Advertising is the harshest dictator of values.
7. Accident is communication with reality.
8. Socialization is the slavery of self-deception.
9. Loneliness is music in the soul that voices feelings and emotions permeat ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

High culture isn't what it used to be. ~ Andrew O'Hagan

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another. ~ Harry Mathews

My workday is non-stop break-neck high stakes and high pressure. Every day. ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan

What God says to His Church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. ~ A.W. Tozer

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. ~ Carl Sagan

If I meet God, I hope she's female. I'm touched by the power of women. I'm married to a feminist. And I'm troubled by the fact that women in our culture are congratulated most for losing weight. ~ Leonard Nimoy

I was heartily sorry to leave Leh, with its dazzling skies and abounding colour and movement, its stirring topics of talk, and the culture and exceeding kindness of the Moravian missionaries. Helpfulness was the rule. ~ Isabella Bird

Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom. ~ Robert A.F. Thurman

I loved the feeling of talking and having somebody really listen to what I have to say. It was like a high or something. ~ Jenny Han

Now is not the time for us to shy away from challenging ourselves to make substantive change for the better. We have the opportunity to raise the bar in the faith-based world by forging a culture in which inclusivity, diversity, and equality are paramount. ~ Lynn Schusterman

If everything Fox News says about liberals were actually true, I'd hate liberals too. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

That's where I spent of lot of my high-school years
in the closet. It wasn't too cramped, but you do get really hot. ~ Amy Lee

Detroit is still seen as the tough city, a city that has a reputation for high crime, ... The tough city thing is fine. Its always had a reputation as that ... You know, Gordie Howe, when I was watching hockey, was the toughest guy in the league playing for the Red Wings. He represented that tough aura. ~ Eugene Levy

The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizens of this plight. ~ John F. Kennedy

As my spiritual growth expanded and developed, voluntary simplicity was a natural outgrowth. I came to realize the cost of material accumulation was too high and offered fewer and fewer real rewards, psychological and spiritual. ~ Duane Elgin

Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no. ~ Chang-rae Lee

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke? ~ Gore Vidal

Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness. ~ Natalia Ginzburg

No piled-up wealth, no social station, no throne, reaches as high as that spiritual plane upon which every human being stands by virtue of his humanity. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face - I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I get nervous about the effect that the high speed of everything will have on creativity. It's already sad for me to see that a lot of young aspiring cartoonists are putting stuff on the web, doing animation on the computer rather than making zines or mini-comics, which seem to be going the way of the dinosaur. ~ Adrian Tomine

As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote ... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for. ~ Shiloh Walker

Once upon a time black male "cool" was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a "poor me" victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others. ~ Bell Hooks

democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders; ~ Robert A. Dahl

The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation. ~ John Seely Brown

The most peaceful thing in the world is plowing a field. Chances are you'll do your best thinking that way. And that's why I've always thought and said, farmers are the smartest people in the world, they don't go for high hats and they can spot a phony a mile off. ~ Harry Truman

It is a messy process for a culture to abandon its dieties. Sprititual beliefs are etched deeply on our psyches at a young age by those we love and trust most --- our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders. Therefore, any religious shifts occur over generations, and not without great angst, and often bloodshed. - Robert Langdon ~ Dan Brown

There is massive evidence that self-selected reading, or reading what you want to read, is responsible for most of our literacy development. Readers have better reading ability, know more vocabulary, write better, spell better, and have better control of complex grammatical constructions. In fact, it is impossible to develop high levels of literacy without being a dedicated reader, and dedicated readers rarely have serious problems in reading and writing. ~ Stephen D. Krashen

If you want to interest people, make them think. If you want to inspire people, make them feel. ~ Ron Kaufman

You tend to become that, what you want most. Look to the light of God, expect the best and give it your best. Make success happen with devotion and dedication. You can do it. ~ Mark LaMoure

don't sit on your patio in the high noon of your tranquility and make light of the huts that people build in the midnight of their desperation. ~ Fred B. Craddock

And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it's a real technical skill. ~ Brian Henson

There is...a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world! ~ Roland Merullo