Cultural Forms Quotes

#1. Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

William Irwin Thompson

#2. It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity ... it's a safe enclosure.

Jonathan Lethem

#3. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because

Virginia Heffernan

#4. I have analyzed the peculiarity of cultural capital, which we should in fact call informational capital to give the notion its full generality, and which itself exists in three forms, embodied, objectified, or institutionalized.

Pierre Bourdieu

#5. Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

Todd Solondz

#6. While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

Janet Fitch

#7. The man of noble mind seeks to achieve the good in others and not their evil. The little-minded man is the reverse of this.

Confucius

#8. I like to think there is something deep in our own world of reality that will create a dynamic balance between technology and human existence, the relationship between which has a decisive effect on contemporary cultural forms and social structure.

Kenzo Tange

#9. Tradition evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles.

James Howard Kunstler

#10. I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

Steven Pinker

#11. We depend on various cultural forms-the syntax and semantics of English, the deliverances of modern astronomy-to know that the earth is round, but this in no way jeopardizes the objective circularity of the planet.

Douglas Groothuis

#12. Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to maintain its difference from - and position above - other cultural forms.

Sarah Thornton

#13. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

Michel Foucault

#14. I think that the cultural dominance of narrative forms that seduce you with character and plot perhaps at the expense of ideas, like The Magic Mountain [won't last]. Starvation sharpens the appetite.

David Mitchell

#15. The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Steven Pinker

#16. Liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.

Cornel West

#17. Our economy's growth functions by inciting us to produce more and more with each passing year. In turn, we require cultural forms to enable us to sort through the glut, and our rituals are once again directed towards the immaterial, towards quality and not quantity.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#18. People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the 'text' in literary terms.

Tony Conrad

#19. Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh.

Rebecca McNutt

#20. Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth. Minds are also forms of cultural achievement.

Elliot W. Eisner

#21. A glass of whisky in Scotland in the thirties cost less than a cup of tea.

Catherine Helen Spence

#22. Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.

Susan Orlean

#23. Religion itself cannot but be dynamic. In order to combat modern materialistic mores, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#24. I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Marshall McLuhan

#25. Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T

Yuval Levin