Melvyn Bragg Quotes

I think culture precedes politics, and I think the attempts to try and legislate people's behavior... isn't going to be productive until the culture decides what they want to achieve.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

There aren't any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there's not much that's missing.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

Culture is not a matter of a change of climate.

Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.

In the 21st century, culture is power.

Culture is your operating system.

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

If I grew up, you know, in the ghetto, like, and I wasn't taught any other way to talk or a way to act or other food to eat or just like anything like that, like, when I'm I supposed to do? You know, like, is there a class I'm supposed to take to learn how to be white, you know?