Chuck Klosterman Quotes

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Great changes cannot take place in the minds of generations of men without a corresponding change in their external symbols. There must be a harmony between the inner and the outward condition of human beings, and the progress of the one must keep pace with the progress of the other.

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough.

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world.

I can't speak for the Kathryn Stockett, but I would guess that she feels proud of the progress the South has made because, growing up, she experienced a very different Mississippi than the one that exists today.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora's box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.