Top 100 Quotes About Society And Art
#1. Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.
Ruadhan J. McElroy
#2. Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.
Victor Pinchuk
#3. Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
Virginia Postrel
#5. Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
Edward Burnett Tylor
#6. To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
Jacob Bronowski
#8. Our Government is pleased to partner with the Kelowna Visual and Performing Arts Centre Society, located in the heart of British Columbia's vibrant Central Okanagan region. Support for the performing arts is essential for the professional growth and development of our Canadian artists.
Shelly Glover
#9. He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.
H.G.Wells
#10. Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.
Camille Paglia
#11. Art starts alone - and convinces society later.
Douglas Davis
#12. There's a radical change in the relationship with the human being and society. Art now is an open conversation with the society. Previously there was a necessity for a little bit of screaming and shouting just to get it into the conversation.
Lawrence Weiner
#13. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#14. Society is indeed a contract ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
Edmund Burke
#15. When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.
Robert Adams
#16. Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#17. The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.
Greg Forster
#18. To understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to understand artists. Art is freedom - freedom of expression - and its message has resonated through society for centuries.
Peter M. Brant
#19. The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick).
Robert Hooke
#20. Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
Huston Smith
#21. And though the philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.
David Hume
#22. You must learn the art of disappearance to protect yourself from the stupid! This art will save your time and your energy and it will keep your mind's purity. And what is this art? It is to isolate yourself for a particular period of time from the society!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#23. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society.
Herbert Read
#24. We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.
Orhan Pamuk
#25. Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.
David Hume
#26. Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d'art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.
Sue Monk Kidd
#27. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising.
George Will
#28. Submitting to history allows us to remember our society's past. Although writing and art express history, it's our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future.
K.P. Kollenborn
#29. True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy
#30. I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
Roy Lichtenstein
#31. Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their original natures.
Francis Parkman
#32. Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.
Harry Belafonte
#33. As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich
#34. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
George Santayana
#35. Art for me ... is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.
Emile Zola
#36. The purpose of the study of judo is to perfect yourself and to contribute to society.
Kano Jigoro
#37. In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.
Nick Hanauer
#38. I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?
Terry Tempest Williams
#39. I am a very, very strong advocate of the notion that we shouldn't equate the arts with other aspects of infrastructure. They have a unique role in any civilised society and that requires appropriate and targeted government support.
George Brandis
#40. I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society ... A society without art will die.
Robert Redford
#41. There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.
Rebecca West
#42. Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.
Louis Faurer
#43. Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
E.L. Doctorow
#44. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
Al Alvarez
#45. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
Ai Weiwei
#46. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Julian Barnes
#47. I'm separated by other performers with whom I might be lumped, since what I say is so intensely personal. I'm anti-art and anti-poetry. As much as possible, I want to inflict my personal pain on the rest of society.
Lydia Lunch
#48. You were bred for humanity and sold to society. One day you'll wake up in the present day, a million generations removed from the expectations of being who you really want to be.
Jethro Tull
#49. The arts reflect profoundly the most democratic credo, the belief in an individual vision or voice ... The arts' belief in potential gives each of us
both audience and creator
pride in our society's ability to nurture individuals.
Wendy Wasserstein
#50. In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
Edward Gibbon
#51. It is important to fund young researchers who want to do curiosity-driven research. Curiosity-driven research is a part of life. Some people are curious. They want to learn more about nature and society should help that. It's like art: you can learn more and bring more beauty.
Serge Haroche
#52. I've always been a bit of a mix between art and technology. I used to paint a lot, but I'm not very good with my hands. It has always been a fusion between my computer gaming interests and being exposed to the rich data of society that we live in.
Aaron Koblin
#53. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.
Kurt Cobain
#55. When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.
John Trudell
#56. Art has often been and continues to be considered transcendent. I see this as misguided and, in fact, a way of subverting the powerful voice art can be in global discussions about politics, economics, society, culture, religion and international relations.
Aman Mojadidi
#57. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.
Harold Rosenberg
#58. In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
Katherine Anne Porter
#59. Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.
Raymond Salvatore Harmon
#60. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.
Jeffrey Lewis
#61. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.
Peter Drucker
#62. In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.
Ernst Fischer
#63. In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.
Ellen Dissanayake
#64. ...Michelangelo transformed both the practice of art and our conception of the artist's role in society.
Miles J. Unger
#65. To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.
Philip Kaufman
#66. Art can no longer be art today if it does not reach into the heart of our present culture and work transformatively within it that is, an art which cannot mould society - and through this naturally operate upon the core questions of our society - is not art.
Joseph Beuys
#67. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.
Brice Marden
#68. Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.
Lewis H. Lapham
#69. Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.
John F. Kennedy
#70. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Aldous Huxley
#71. If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money.
Robert Crumb
#72. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.
Slawomir Mrozek
#73. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
Alfred North Whitehead
#74. How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.
Kermit The Frog
#75. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#76. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#77. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.
Dana Gioia
#78. For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society).
Merold Westphal
#79. Real poetry is art at its purest sense. It is never a commodity, but a breath of eternity.
Subhan Zein
#80. My art gives contemporary art a juvenile-delinquent phase. Its self-made style gleefully trashes conventions of beauty and society while pick-pocketing from the coolest underground styles and beliefs of the previous centuries.
Steve Olson
#81. The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The
Lewis Hyde
#82. Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'
affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
Banksy
#83. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.
Frank O'Connor
#84. Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
Edward Bond
#85. The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.
Edward Gibbon
#86. Being and having in our society teaches us how to take possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting go. For there is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.
Gabriel Marcel
#87. I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.
Hans Haacke
#89. All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
Bernard Berenson
#90. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
#91. If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings.
Thomas Sowell
#92. The idea that ballet is a white art is absurd and shocking, and it's gone on for too long. Nothing would make me happier than having a company that reflects society, to have dancers onstage that people can relate to.
Benjamin Millepied
#93. Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics.
Virginia Postrel
#94. Art is an imagination, projection, and reflection of the mind in a particular form that society can internalize and enjoy.
Debasish Mridha
#95. By 1833 the largest publisher in America, Harper and Company, boasted one horse-powered printing press and seven hand presses while the American Bible Society owned 16 new state-of-the-art, steam-driven presses and 20 hand presses.
Phil Cooke
#96. It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.
Herbert Read
#97. Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Victor Hugo
#98. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
Henry A. Kissinger
#99. I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.
Hollace M. Metzger
#100. As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't.
Charles De Lint
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