Cultural Rebirth Quotes

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there.

Haiti is not a world aside, a world apart. Culture and imaginations have always been part of our rebirth.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasn't heard it.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.

When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, I think of bright colors, and bold, dynamic art. African American artists of the period were, in large measure, breaking out of the constrictions white society had set for them. They were claiming and remaking their own images, and doing so in bold and striking ways.

Russia was culturally isolated for so long that some sort of transformation needs to happen and will happen.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited. I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity -- a function. We don't need history.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

Seance to renaissance. So it begins

Renaissance always comes out of depression.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

My life has been devoted to the upliftment of the Filipino by reestablishing his identity and dignity.

The Renaissance… was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again.