Cultural Disillusionment Quotes

When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Deprived of national pride in their lifelong beliefs, Russians experienced a bit of my eyes of the Soviet era as the end of empire, and a sense of national identity. In a state of moral, material and physical despair, they yearned to feel better about themselves and their land.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

The West will one day regret its shallow ideas that alienate people from their true nature. One must seek the right religion and the right belief.

I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam.

Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans." "But you are an American." "Incurably so, it seems.

Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets.

weltschmerz: its the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be.

That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

I'm surprised and disappointed in American culture.

Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, 'Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.' Since then, I started to think differently.

I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago, divorced myself from it emotionally. It gives me an artistic detachment that I find valuable. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise, for the sake of cell phones and Jet Skis.

The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don’t have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons—and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson—we raise children and send them to war.

The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.

There are a lot of so-called "good Americans" who are really a bunch of bums.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for the American culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species - and my culture in America specifically - have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.