Contemporary Culture Quotes

#1. We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Ali Smith

#2. Far too many young people coming of age today have no spiritual or emotional roots. They have been deprived of values by an agnostic and contemporary culture.

Billy Graham

#3. The new Babylonian captivity is what we have done to ourselves, namely, the strange fascination with our contemporary culture evident across denominational and confessional lines.

Harold L. Senkbeil

#4. Contemporary culture is like the weather - we have to be open to it. I don't like the way it is dismissed or closed down.

Amanda Harlech

#5. Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Simon Blackburn

#6. Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

Rowan Williams

#7. There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Rollo May

#8. There's something within contemporary culture which is far more faux masculine than it was when men were really men.

David Gordon Green

#9. Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#10. Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.

Dean Koontz

#11. The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as 'math,' although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.

Seymour Papert

#12. Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Robert Bly

#13. Sometimes I think that I stay young and in touch with contemporary culture because of my children's interests. I'm so lucky to be surrounded by their talent and vibrancy.

Polixeni Papapetrou

#14. I love fashion. What I love is the ability to express yourself, to be able to make a product and shoot an ad campaign that tosses you out into the world and lets you have a voice in contemporary culture, iconography. I felt a little bit neutered not having that voice.

Tom Ford

#15. There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.

Michael Leunig

#16. The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.

Andrew Delbanco

#17. I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Rachel Cusk

#18. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

Don DeLillo

#19. I love contemporary culture. Even the stuff I don't like.

Natalie Massenet

#20. The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.

Lesslie Newbigin

#21. The spiritual atrophying of contemporary culture may be due in large measure to its loss of sensitivity to processes in the collective unconscious.

Terence McKenna

#22. History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.

Steven Spielberg

#23. Far too many young people today have no spiritual roots. The've been deprived of values by an agnostic, contemporary culture.

Billy Graham

#24. One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

George Crumb

#25. By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

James Henry Breasted

#26. What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

George Bernard Shaw

#27. Underground electronic music is art - fundamentally it's based on contemporary art, culture, dance, and real music. If you look at EDM, how many of those cultural standpoints are the same?

Seth Troxler

#28. For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

Flea

#29. Youth culture now really looks back and embraces the past, but keeps it contemporary but not sticking to one particular style.

Alexander McQueen

#30. In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

Stephen L. Carter

#31. Beyond the mythology, Wonder Woman gets to play with several dichotomies. It's Amazon culture versus man's world; ancient mythological times versus the contemporary world; and, of course, all the male and female issues.

Bruce Timm

#32. Many people are caught up with the toys of contemporary society. Because of great advancements in our culture, some have cultivated an attitude of "comfortability." They may be going to hell, but it is going to be a comfortable ride for them.

A.W. Tozer

#33. It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps

Thomas Nagel

#34. Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

George Crumb

#35. I would love to say there was some contemporary artist who's work really got me thinking, but lately I have just been trying to sort out 20 years of garbage TV culture that is filling my brain.

Cory Arcangel

#36. The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.

William A. Henry III

#37. When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Tom Perrotta

#38. People see their own lives as stories; a lifelong story with a single hero or heroine ... much contemporary unhappiness is due to the fact that people in high tech societies receive neither strong myths and stories from their culture nor the ability to construct their own ... they lose the plot.

Guy Claxton

#39. Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

John Blacking

#40. We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.

Theodore C. Bestor

#41. The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.

Terry Teachout

#42. Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.

James Burnham

#43. Contemporary fiction is the hardest for me because I am not really in the popular culture - I don't watch TV.

Gail Carson Levine

#44. Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.

Henry Jenkins

#45. Hindi cinema, now often referred to loosely by the term 'Bollywood', is one of the best-known and most widely appreciated features of contemporary Indian culture. It makes its presence felt beyond the screen throughout wider media, whether the Internet,

Rachel Dwyer

#46. A lot of contemporary American culture makes its way to this county. Cuba is not some gray, isolated backwater. This is a happening place.

Assata Shakur

#47. A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Wangechi Mutu

#48. I've come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#49. In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

Michael Leunig

#50. Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

James Rosenquist

#51. The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.

Rod Dreher

#52. As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality ... for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

Mark Galli

#53. White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Ntozake Shange

#54. It seems to me that the sad event of 9/11 has created a huge opportunity for the revitalization of lower Manhattan - new world class contemporary buildings, more open space and pedestrian connections, more sustainability, more culture and the rejuvenation of New York on the world stage again.

Paul Goldberger

#55. I find it significant that, even though contemporary philosophy tends towards forms of determinism, in the wider culture people are deeply into naming, shaming and blaming each other. So we haven't lost that sense of conscience.

John Cornwell

#56. I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.

Takashi Murakami

#57. Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music, cosplay, and maker culture - that we tend to imagine its superficial aspects are all that define it.

Paul Di Filippo

#58. I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

Bharati Mukherjee

#59. Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture.

Alexander Stoddart