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- b.1821 d.1893...
Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture. (John Abbott)
-South African novelist...
You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values. (Peter Abrahams)
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. (Theodor W. Adorno)
We are not just a country of war or oil. We are a proud culture that goes back 6,000 years to the Sumerians. We have been making art for longer than anyone. This is what gives us identity. This is what will make our art last another 1,000 years, when all this war is forgotten. (Qasim Al-Sabti)
Artists create identities for cultures and societies. (Anonymous)
The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. (Rudolf Arnheim)
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. (Matthew Arnold)
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and what is more, the passion for making them prevail. (Matthew Arnold)
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. (James Baldwin)
The art consensus is not criteria, it is convenience. (Darby Bannard)
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others? (Mary Catherine Bateson)
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex. (Ruth Benedict)
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. (Ruth Fulton Benedict)
No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism... (Joseph Beuys)
Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish! (William Blake)
We are no longer dependant on what New York, Paris, Rome or L.A. says about culture and art. We have become both international and regional at the same time. (Linda Blondheim)
Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity. (Christian Nestell Bovee)
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. (Ray Bradbury)
I'm convinced that in a healthy society, artistic norms should be constantly under question which is not of course, to deny the need for continuity. (Earle Brown)
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second, hand. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking...
Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them. (Susan Cain)
Art is the root culture of any nation that invests faithfully in education. Without art in all its forms, a nation is barbaric. (Gavin Calf)
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future. (Albert Camus)
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being. (Thomas Carlyle)
The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it – it's as immediate and as superficial as that. (Matthew Collings)
In studying other cultures, we learn more about ourselves and our relationship to all things in this world. (Eustace Conway)
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also. (Charles Horton Cooley)
To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them – in a word, to create a living art – this has been my aim. (Gustave Courbet)
Works of art are not passive reflections of economic, social or political conditions. They actively enable a society, or group within society, to accomplish various goals that could not otherwise be obtained. (Corinne D'Antonio)
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. (Angela Davis)
- The God Delusion...
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion. (Richard Dawkins)
Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. (Daniel Dennett)
I am sure that only art will bring together all the peoples of the world. (Ousmane Dia)
In every human society of which we know – prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial – at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in. (Ellen Disanayake)
We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, they continually lead to new changes in the brain. (Norman Doidge)
The basic element of every culture is ART. (David Dory)
Every culture is defined by its artists. (David Dory)
Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end. (Will Durant)
The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value. (Denis Dutton)
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why. (Henry van Dyke)
Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been. (Brian Eno)
Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass-you don't see it, but somehow it does something. (Hans Magnus Enzensberger)
I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me. (Walker Evans)
What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself. (Thomas Frank)
In an impatient, disposable culture, care and quality are overlooked for drive-through speed... the multitaskers shall inherit the earth... (Eric Frantz)
The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? (Jonathan Franzen)
In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.' (Edward J. Fraughton)
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. (Erich Fromm)
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive. (Mahatma Gandhi)
I do not want my house to be rounded by walls and my windows to be closed to other cultures. I wish to become familiar with the culture of lands as much as possible but I will not permit them to affect me or shake me from my own status. (Mahatma Gandhi)
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture. (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
Painters paint, and history continues to make fools of curators. (Robert Genn)
When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles. (Chief Dan George)
The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design. (Elizabeth Gilbert)
Whoever controls the media – the images – controls the culture. (Allen Ginsberg)
All art is an individual's expression of a culture. Cultures differ, so art looks different. (Henry Glassie)
The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved. (Clement Greenberg)
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas. (Franz Grillparzer)
Culture is something that evolves out of the simple, enduring elements of everyday life; elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation. (Thor Hansen)
If you see in any given situation only what everyone else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it. (S. I. Hayakawa)
A culture can never be truly erased. There is always some type of residue, the way you dream, the way you walk. (Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle)
Art is the product of the culture of the day. That which is a clone of yesterday's art is not art at all. (Susan Holland)
Men who sit back and pride themselves on their culture haven't any to speak of. (Elbert Hubbard)
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture. (Robert Hughes)
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. (John F. Kennedy)
We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed 'high' and the 'low.' (Austin Kleon)
Our culture... celebrates the shortcuts and calls it 'personal expression,' no matter what kind of garbage or personal neuroses is displayed upon the canvas. We have lost the quest for exquisiteness in our work. (Sharon Knettell)
The process of immersing myself in other cultures has become the most intensely emotional artistic experience of my life. (Glen Knowles)
Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations. If everyone recognizes and fulfills his cycle of obligations, genuineness emerges. The culture of a whole nation can in the final analysis be built upon nothing else. (Kathe Kollwitz)
Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not. (Barbara Kruger)
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture.. not only national culture but global culture. You can make good art anywhere. But these two towns have an incredible density of cultural producers: people who migrate to them in order to define themselves through their work. (Barbara Kruger)
We could learn a lot from the Innuit - a community-based culture. (Diane Langlois)
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. (Christopher Lasch)
Color is one way the eye and the brain work together to define the external world. However, not all cultures see color in the same way, nor do they give it as much importance as in western culture. (Nita Leland)
The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is... not only sad, it's devastating. (John Leonard, critic)
Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings. (Claude Levi-Strauss)
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. (Walter Lippmann)
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization. (Walter Lippmann)
The artist has to be a guardian of the culture. (Robert Longo)
I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth. (Yo-Yo Ma)
Art surrounds us in its totality. Why does our culture persist in separating art from function? At the start of the 21st century we are surrounded by a preponderance of bad design and eyesores upon the land, in our homes and in the media. (Barbara MacDougall)
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts. (Norman Mailer)
The effect of positive globalization on art is dual, for without native or national art there can be no globalization and without globalization there can be no unity in the world today. (Abed Malhas)
In so far as he is a creator, the artist does not belong to a social group already moulded by a culture, but to a culture which he is by way of building up. (Andre Malraux)
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy. (Kerry James Marshall)
Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is the real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss. (Robert Motherwell)
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. (Lewis Mumford)
Our culture made a virtue out of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. (Anais Nin)
My work has usually been universal. The figures have never really been that specific. They're not clothed; they're not identified with any trappings that specifically tie them down to 2005. It could be today, but they could be from some other time, a long time ago. (Nathan Oliveira)
People today read less, take fewer museum trips, and attend fewer concerts. Is that because these activities aren't as fun? The decline... can be traced, at least in part, to unconscious stimuli that make us live faster. (Frank Partnoy)
The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads. (Walter Pater)
May we, as image makers, shapers of the culture, set our sights on things we value, rituals we engage in that heal and serve. May our images honor the ordinary endeavors of common people, and may they make their way to the eyes of the weary – light to the dark, fire to the chill. (Jan Phillips)
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. (Ezra Pound)
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth. (Ayn Rand)
Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature - in the good sense of the word - will he create genuine culture. (Wilhelm Reich)
As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art... (Milton Resnick)
- Out Of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School by Geoffrey Dorfman...
Your culture demands that you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you can not bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis into your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question. (Milton Resnick)
- Straw for the Fire, a selection from his journals...
Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else. (Theodore Roethke)
The artist is the record keeper of present time and keeper of timeless culture. (Yaroslaw Rozputnyak)
We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time. (Don Miguel Ruiz)
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. (John Ruskin)
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? (John Ruskin)
There must not be a canon of orthodoxy where art is judged and measured. The culture cannot move forward with our heads turned backwards. (Paul Russo)
My art is based on impurity. You have to mix things from different refined cultures to get something raw, to make it go again. (Sean Scully)
Would that different societies and cultures be as readily mixable as are pigments on a palette. As in painting, it would take only some basic learning and the right attitude. (Ian Semple)
A poor thing, perhaps, but my own. (William Shakespeare)
When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book's content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn't matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture? (Leonard Shlain)
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music. (Stendhal)
Our age - it is of science - of mechanism - of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage. (Clyfford Still)
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written. (Mark Strand)
If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. (Henry David Thoreau)
Our culture predisposes us towards certain values but we need to become open to other cultures and help them to survive. (Sheila Timmins)
The Law of Raspberry Jam: The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets. (Alvin Toffler)
The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction. (Harry S. Truman)
The best art intersects the culture it exists in, rather than critiques it. (Meyer Vaisman)
Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with. (Jimmy Wales)
-from The Value of Art...
One artist over a period of 40 years can depict through their art a complete and distinctive cultural identity of their region. (Barbara Weaver-Bosson)
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors. (Simone Weil)
In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us. (Margaret J. Wheatley)
What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe. (Kehinde Wiley)
Art speaks the soul of its culture. (Abby Willowroot)
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. (Tom Wolfe)
You can lead a person to culture, but you can't make them think. (Tom Wolfe)
Cultural activity and access to the materials of the life of the imagination is as ordinary and as vital as the right to read, the right to shelter, squarely at the centre of our lives as the catalyst of our imaginations and the prompter of our dreams. (Max Wyman)
The first principle of modern cultures may be their connectedness. Culture is like wind and wind knows no boundary or center. Once there is a center, wind becomes a whirlwind. (Mu Xin)
We are in the process of a cultural revolution under global culturalism. (Gu Xiong)
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