1. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
2. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
3. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
4. A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement
5. I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
6. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
7. Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
8. My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.
9. Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
10. My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.
11. Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.
12. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.
13. Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.
14. Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.
15. Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.
16. Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
17. Your brand must communicate the value that you bring to a working relationship.
18. Language is the key to the heart of people.
19. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.
20. To be or not to be that is the question.
21. The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
22. Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.
23. There’s no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
24. The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
25. The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.
26. Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.
27. They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.
28. In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.
29. The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.
30. The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
31. What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
32. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
33. In the fashion industry, everything goes retro except the prices.
34. Come forward as servants of Islam, organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.
35. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
36. 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.
37. I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?
38. A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing. You never know when she’ll throw away a piece you may need.
39. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
40. Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
41. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
42. I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.
43. This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.
44. She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
45. We’ve finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don’t want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.
46. Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It’s the most important thing that happens, and it’s the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
47. We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.
48. Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested.
49. The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
50. A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
51. If privacy had a gravestone it might read: ‘Don’t Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.
52. We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.
53. Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
54. What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.
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55. What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
56. We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
57. Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.
58. Be out of the mainstream. I’m out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?
59. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
60. Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing “selves” that are worth expressing.
