Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

When I was 13 years old, I was dressing in a rap style. And then I changed schools, and the rap style became old-fashioned, so I changed it completely.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

We limit ourselves. We're told to act and behave in certain way from birth.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.

Is virtue raised by culture, or self-sown?

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion.

We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.

How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.