English humor resembles the Loch Ness Monster in that both are famous but there is a strong suspicion that neither exists.
I grew up in the era, 'Don't trust anybody over 30.' And, you know, I still feel that. Don't trust me.
I think it is harder to scare young people because there is an ironic hipster stance that you have to take in relation to pop culture. You know you're being manipulated. People are so aware of the manipulation. We're all aware that movies toy with us and pull our strings. There was a time when people just didn't acknowledge that as much.
Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.
When anybody goes to L.A. from London, there's always this slight sense of, 'What are you doing? Who do you think you are? It's never gonna happen.' It's the classic, good-natured British cynicism.
Stephen L. Carter coined the phrase 'the culture of disbelief' to describe the prevailing hostility in Western culture toward public expressions of faith.
I've always been dead set against festivals - really suspicious and wary.
Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.
I think, generally, British people are more culturally cynical about the things that involve our own country. Especially the royals.
Kids are so smart these days. They sense when there's a phony bologna out there. Especially in music, when they see something that's being marketed to them, they'll call it out. They'll be like, "This chick is bullshit."
This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.
God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat...college.
I think, in Australia, it's kind of a crazy thing to say, 'I want to be an actor.' People look at you weirdly. And when I said I was moving to L.A., I remember people saying, 'No, you shouldn't. You'll just come back disappointed.'
Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.
In the coffee shops of the Middle East, where only conspiracies are believed and the simple truth is considered naivete or duplicity, America’s motives are invariably assumed to be malicious.
We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Deep down, the ordinary Frenchman doesn't believe that Turks, or Eastern Europeans for that matter, cherish the values he holds most dear. Nor do the French much trust that the Germans and the British have French interests at heart. Given European history -- and given what I see around me -- I can't say I blame them.
