Cultural Value Quotes

In today's world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they're cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Pop music will never be low brow.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

I think in our culture there's been a tendency for people to blame the audience. There is a tendency in our industry to say, 'The audience has left the building. People don't want culture anymore.'

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

Just because something's kinda indie and whatever and only a few people know it, it doesn't give it more authenticity over Rihanna's 'Work' work work.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

What does culture mean? It's not a physical thing. I love a museum, but that, for me, doesn't make you a better person.

The dignity of history.

I think that selling rights is a bad move commercially, not just morally. It cheapens the songs. When people come to my concerts, they often hold up candles when we do "Let It Be." I don't think they'd do that anymore if the song suddenly became part of an Oldsmobile ad.

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling.

One measure of the degree of civilization attained by a nation might fairly be the extent to which the nation's creative artists are supported, encouraged and esteemed by the nation as a whole.

I don't know why records are treated different than books. I don't know why an Eminem record is different than a Stephen King movie.

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

Intelligence is the ability to find and solve problems and create products of value in one's own culture.

It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

The cultural value of 'Gossip Girl' was this interesting question. Sure, it seemed to have been a worldwide, cultural phenomenon for some time. And, yes, anywhere I go, I do get recognized. At the same time, it also lacked the kind of importance that people might anticipate.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

Only art means anything.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls