Cultural Excess Quotes

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

Man, the '80s were pretty wacky. You had some stuff that was just so rad and some stuff that was just so wrong.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

When I came to America, there was a lot of decadence in New York in the early '70s because the city was bankrupt and you could do whatever you want!

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature, we have the pedant.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?

There is a certain sort of excess that is interesting, don't you think? And America is, of course, the most excessive place.

In L.A., there are so many people that are focused on being healthy that it's unhealthy.