“I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of

false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human
cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for
biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree
that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the
beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the
greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”
― Plato, The Republic of Plato

“It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical
inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal
kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant...
is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions
he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and
omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him -
he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has
himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in
the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects
not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite
magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him
trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably
inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture,
which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the
culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural
norm, even our cultural ideal.”
― Carl Bernstein

“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some
level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money,
and so design had given way to expediency.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some
sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly
evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its
future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. ”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World