Cultural Priorities Quotes

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

In Indian companies, people aren't too worried about the pace of growth as long as you're setting up a business which will survive for years.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

People won't stop painting, just as they won't stop making music or dancing. This is a facility we have. Children don't stop doing it or having it. On the other hand, it seems we don't need painting anymore. Culture is more interested in entertaining people.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Facebook revealed that Ebola was the most popular Facebook topic in the U.S. this year, with the World Cup coming in sixth. So welcome to America, where even Ebola is more popular than soccer.

A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.

People don't really go to museums in Rio. I shouldn't say it's not sophisticated, but, you know, they go to the beach.

The difference between a white man and an Indian is this- A white man wants to leave money to his children. An Indian wants to leave forests.

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs

If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.

The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

'Fine casual' means taking the cultural priorities that fine dining, at its best, believes in.

As a culture, we're so worried about what's going to happen to us 30 years from now that we are not taking care of our brothers and sisters who need help today.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

There's a lot of demand to hear the new Kanye West album before it hits the streets. There's much less demand to read the new Phillip Roth novel.

Education is extremely important to the Hispanic community, as well as faith, and certainly working hard.

Austerity has led us to a terrible philosophy where we think we've got to cut back on everything that's 'frippery', like the arts.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.