Carl Bernstein Quotes

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

We're getting dumbed down, taste-wise.

Maybe the culture is [particularly] shabby now. Maybe it's because I'm over sixty, that I can feel that about everything.

There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.

Our political system cannot stop the degradation of our culture.

In every area, we seem to have thrown everything away and embraced reality television. It's nauseating, programme after programme.

It's just unconscionable that America has become so stupid.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.

Seriously, 'Honey Boo Boo' is the decay of Western civilization. Just because so many people watch the show doesn't mean it's good.

My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.

I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies.

The mainstream consumed our culture.

People are always talking about the dumbing down of the country.

I can say, particularly as a mother of four small children. I can talk about the coarsening of our culture.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

Donald Trump is an especially depressing phenomena because he is so debased and debasing and millions and millions of people want him to be president. We're seeing how at least whole swathes of white America are becoming your worst nightmare of eternal Zombie High School. Something like a perfect mix of Groundhog Day and The Moronic Inferno. How can it be that a guy who looks like a bloated cadaver pulled from the Gowanus canal, with some rouge on his cheeks and a sticky Something About Mary wig, is actually applauded by his followers for making fun of how other people look?

The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

When a nation forgets her skill in war, when her religion becomes a mockery, when the whole nation becomes a nation of money-grabbers, then the wild tribes, the barbarians drive in... Who will our invaders be? From whence will they come?

The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.