Critical Culture Quotes

#1. I come from a very critical culture. You know the Scots. They're always saying: 'Oh, no. It will never work. You'll never amount to anything. You've got to know your place in the world.'

Craig Ferguson

#2. A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

George Saunders

#3. Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Theodor Adorno

#4. In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

Theodor W. Adorno

#5. Really feeling your body move and the life inside of yourself is critical. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so.

Krista Tippett

#6. The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others.

Pankaj Gupta

#7. Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.

Edna Longley

#8. For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

Chiang Kai-shek

#9. We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

Susan Sontag

#10. I am not one of the great journalists of my time.

Jane Pauley

#11. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Steve Erickson

#12. What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can't be mass marketed.

Claire Vaye Watkins

#13. Quite often, the consequence of gaining literacy or critical consciousness is alienation not just from the values of the dominant culture, but from the ways of knowing and being that characterize one's own immediate family and community.

Margo V. Perkins

#14. Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.

Dan Savage

#15. How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment?

Nicolas Bourriaud

#16. Congress does investigations better than they do anything else.

Mitch Landrieu

#17. The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#18. Because there's such a long tradition of the arts being very prominent and very varied in Cuban culture and society, people do use the art world as a space for critical reflection and people look to it for that.

Rachael Price

#19. Paste magazine has served as a tremendous window into culture for my house. I can think of no other publication that provides such critical yet entertaining thoughts on music, movies, books and gaming as Paste. My mailbox would be a dark place indeed without it.

Derek Webb

#20. The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect
this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.

Twyla Tharp

#21. The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.

H.W. Brands

#22. A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

John Steinbeck

#23. I've gone through back surgery a couple times, and of course, my radiation treatments for six weeks got me to the point where I was not able to play at the level that I was accustomed to.

Mario Lemieux

#24. A vigorous culture capable of making corrective,stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding.

Jane Jacobs

#25. You don't have to worry about what happened last year; you can start fresh.

D'Brickashaw Ferguson

#26. You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.

Robert Greene

#27. Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.

Noam Chomsky

#28. A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.

Michael R. LeGault

#29. One of the critical skills in creative work is note-taking. Practically all the great geniuses of our culture, ranging from Leonardo to Edison, from Hemingway to Picasso, have been almost pathological note-takers.

Lauri Jarvilehto

#30. For another life, in another universe, with you by my side.

Mia Asher

#31. I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

Elisabeth Shue

#32. Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them and non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work.

Timothy Keller

#33. We are better than our culture. Load us down with prejudice, equip us with indifference, and we will nevertheless, at the critical moment, cast the nonsense aside and find our true selves.

Jack McDevitt

#34. All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#35. The heavenly sound of music kindles my heart, twinkles my mind, and feeds my soul so that I may transcend and transform.

Debasish Mridha

#36. If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

Umberto Eco

#37. The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.

George Eliot

#38. Music is critical in our lives and culture. It's the inspiration that drives us. It's also the window to our souls. It's a reflection as to who we are, what we stand for and where we're going.

Bill Walton

#39. A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?

Ryan Holmes