Robert Christgau Quotes

As the publisher of the 'Tory,' I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.

My cousin used to make fun of me for liking stuff like C+C Music Factory. I didn't have any tapes; I just liked their song on the radio. We liked that because that was what we had access to.

I was on 'Melrose' at a time where we had to all go home and be there at the same time when the show was on, or set your VCR. But that was a big thing, and people of my generation still talk about that. They remember where they were, at what point of their lives that show came, and then talking about it the next day.

Because they are inherently social, people find value in reading the same books and watching the same movies that others do.

Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.

The individualism of the Arab has been erased from this society.

I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.

Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface, but it's not. It's the language we all speak, and it's the connection point between people all over the world.

In Australia, we cling on to whatever culture we have. We're such a multicultural country.

I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.

Florida is a place of unparalleled diversity of backgrounds, experiences and vision. It makes our culture unique, but it can also make it difficult to define a common identity and create a sense of community that reaches beyond our neighborhoods to all corners of our state.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

Here's an idea: How about just 'Americans?' That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our 'separateness' is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot.

A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

If there is only one culture all over the world, that's not a good thing.

A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.

You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.

I see dance as glue for a community.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

There is no 'European people' united by common mores.

You can start any 'Monty Python' routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.

One motherland, one sanskriti (culture), common ancestry and heritage and unity in diversity. It is these three that constitute the national culture. The mode of worship can differ from person to person.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.