Quotes about Culture

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.

What do you call the weak point? He paused. The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.

A frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.

For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Marry—but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.