France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they’ve forgotten all about it. I’m afraid that the American culture is a disaster. Johnny Depp
I am going to be the Australian Cultural Attaché to the Court of Saint James. I also have the distinction of being the first official failure of the Betty Ford Foundation. How about that? Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson
Whenever I hear the world culture ... I release the safety-catch of my Browning! Hanns Johst, Schlageter, 1933
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
You can see the impulse of the British to close in on old images of themselves ... Then I look at young black nation kids ... I just think creatively, culturally, they are on top of the world. Stuart Hall, interview The Late Show 1989
Culturally we’re in the kind of phase of permanent revolution. Stuart Hall
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
When I first came here [Cambridge] I used to walk out past these gates and wall, out of historic Cambridge and into another and very different Cambridge. You can feel almost at once the change in the atmosphere. A different feel, a different sound in the air. This again is crossing a border. Raymond Williams, Border Country, BBC 1970
From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 1973
The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life. Our meaning of culture is a response to the events which our meanings of industry and democracy most evidently define. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1958
The idea of culture describes our common inquiry but our conclusions are diverse, as our starting points were diverse. The word, culture, cannot automatically be pressed into service as any kind of social or personal directive. ibid.
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers – poets, actors, journalists – they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don’t fight technology. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures. Cesar Chavez
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. Noam Chomsky
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. Alan W Watts
The term ‘culture’, which originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau’s criticism of ‘modern liberalism and Enlightenment’. Thus a contrast between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity and culture as cultivation of waywardness or free individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term ‘culture’, although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should achieve, namely the full ‘expression’ of the unique or ‘authentic’ self. Richard Velkley, The Tension in the Beautiful: On Culture and Civilization in Rousseau and German Philosophy
The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some ways. ‘Civilized’ society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, art, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together. Peter Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved. Andre Malraux
Culture is an elevated expression of the inner voice which the different peoples of the Earth have heard in the depths of their being, a voice which conveys the vibrant compassion and wisdom of the cosmic life. For different cultures to engage in interaction is to catalyse each other’s souls and foster mutual understanding. Daisaku Ikeda
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that’. And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Terence McKenna
Some refer to it as a cultural Chernobyl. I think of it as a cultural Stalingrad. J G Ballard, Daily Telegraph 2nd July 1994, re Euro Disney
I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order. J G Ballard
There’s guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. Steven Pinker
By 2012 much of our industrial base was gone ... But there is one thing I think that we do better than anyone else on the planet – popular culture. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You I: The New British Empire, BBC 2015
Rank [cinema] had discovered that on the cultural front Britishness, British history, was our greatest assets. ibid.
The Beatles were an immaculately packaged product. ibid.
The sixties only swung for a tiny minority. ibid.
A new kind of cultural hero – the geeky genius ... Video games have been the fastest growing cultural commodity in the world. ibid.
The Redlands’ drugs bust showed how the self-made stars of the ’60s were changing from street-fighting men to Lords of the manor. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You II: In With the Old
The outsiders became insiders – and the triumph of the old order. ibid.
Henry VIII is virtually an industry in his own right. ibid.
To me, Roger Moore’s Bond is basically the embodiment of effortless superiority. ibid.
It really was fashionable to stand up on this stage and make fun of Britain’s politicians. ibid.
In the mid-eighties Spitting Image attracted some fifteen million viewers. ibid.
Westminster remains the domain of a gilded political elite ever more detached. ibid.
We share our predecessors’ anxieties about the dangers of scientific progress. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You III: Modern Victorians
Live Aid was the most ambitious live music event ever attempted. ibid.
Dr Who: remains every inch the Victorian adventurer. ibid.
In Cookson’s world, industry is a monstrous machine. An endless cycle of low pay, unreliable hours and sheer hard labour. ibid.
Trainspotting exploded into Britain's cinemas in 1996. ibid.
What Christie’s books also reflect, though, is the Christian principles that she had learned as a girl in the last years of the nineteenth century. ibid.