Michel de Montaigne Quotes

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Russians would make charming visitors at New-Yorke, and civilize that part of America wonderfully.

America is the new Roman Empire. Remember what happened to Rome.

The movies television and music we used to produce created an image of America that the world envied... now the millions around the world call us the Great Satan - and with good cause.

A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

Culture is so much faster and so much more effective than anything else. If you go on a march, you march for a couple hours and it might be on the news that night, but if it happens culturally, it happens forever. Everywhere in the world, that TV show is being played. Someone is downloading it illegally. It's blowing someone else's mind. Culture marches so quickly, and it's a language we all understand.

Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.

America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.

My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world has come upon a moment of reckoning. We've seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deal, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations.

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.

Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

We are all victims of culture.