Cultural Paradox Quotes

Americans are pragmatic; we want quick, clean, simple solutions to vast problems. The paradox is that we're a deeply confessional culture, but we're not often contemplative.

I think in a way the great irony or paradox about America is that it makes it so hard for the sensitive person, the artist, the impressionable person, the person whose raison d'etre is to incarnate the creative will, rather than to just make money, and yet that extreme difficulty that the culture poses for us has created some of the best artists in the last hundred years.

Nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America--and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

I guess, being French, I love Hollywood.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. It's one of those places where you can't help but trip over history at every turn. It's a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin's Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world.

I am the most un-French Frenchman you will ever meet.

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.

Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.

Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.

Though it's safe to say there are a whole lotta American gals who agree with the core ideals of feminism, they are somehow nevertheless watching 'Say Yes to the Dress' by the millions.

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.

We are proud of our ridiculousness. That's what made our Surrealism. Proud and ashamed of everything at the same time. I think that's my definition of Belgium.

The Indian cowboy is such a uniquely American contradiction.

I am an unusual Irishman. I'm probably Ireland's third most famous Jewish son.

A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.

People eat the chicken, people eat the beef, they still say, 'Don't kill the fish.'

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.