Top 21 Philistinism Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Philistinism

#1. Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.

Helon Habila

#2. Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Matthew Arnold

#3. The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

Vladimir Nabokov

#4. Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity - he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.

H.L. Mencken

#5. Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

V.S. Pritchett

#6. The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.

Lewis H. Lapham

#7. To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.

Susan Sontag

#8. The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Susan Sontag

#9. Fascism of the masses is nothing but disillusioned radicalism plus nationalistic philistinism

Wilhelm Reich

#10. Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.

Robin Boyd

#11. A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Conrad Black

#12. We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist.

Georg Brandes

#13. The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

V.S. Pritchett