Culture Quotes - Page 125

Those externalized costs have always included labor. It is only the decline over time of the minimum wage in real dollars that's made the fast food industry possible, along with feedlot agriculture, pharmaceuticals on the farm, pesticides and regulatory forbearance. All these things are part of the answer to the question: Why is that crap so cheap? Our food is dishonestly priced. One of the ways in which it's dishonestly priced is the fact that people are not paid a living wage to process it, to serve it, to grow it, to slaughter it.

I'm caught up probably just as much in the consumer culture as the next person.

You know, to me, that's going to influence the culture. They both influence each other - I know that - but, you know, there's no two ways about it. When you're just immersed in kind of this dark, edgy constant flow of entertainment, there's no way it can't affect you. There's just no way.

There is a deadening conformity in the culture of cyberspace in which we don't intend to participate.

All great companies have spirit and culture. Mean spirited returns mean spirit.

The proliferation of new music groups and individual performers focusing on new music today is heartening. On the one hand the culture is very resistant to new things, and yet it continues to change and grow.

Not just in Christian music but also in a lot of Christian culture there is a lot of pretending that everyone is perfect, nobody is really going through much.

Unfortunately, most news writing is the product of a first draft culture.

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.

A lot of the commercial expression of hip-hop leaves a lot to be desired - but then, there's a lot of whack gospel music, but I'm not leading a crusade against it. Of course, the vices of hip-hop are far more influential, I understand. But the good that hip-hop transmits, the power of the culture to rally the best of our protest, and uplift, and resistance, traditions, is often unfairly overlooked.

The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.

I wanted to make new works of very contemporary objects, which I thought was interesting because many of them are manufactured in China, but these objects are universal, they go across all languages, all cultures.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

I think that cultural influence is very deep, it is not on the surface and this is true in every culture.

A lot of the pieces I've done over the years have involved alterations of scale and the idea of the viewer's relationship to the object and how we see things by either enlarging or reducing objects, it causes the viewer to look at them again. It's hard to do because our culture is so bombarded by images and media. How do you make something fresh for a viewer? That's a real challenge.

I've spent most of my life in L.A. and I'm still amazed at things that I don't know about the place. There are a lot of places I've never been to yet and I may never even make it. There's so much here and there's so much of a variety in terms of culture now. It's amazing. It's all here in one big city. In a lot of ways, the city is unique in the world because it's hard to find another city that has the diversity and range. It's a microcosmic planet, if you look at it that way. And in that sense, it's very much an experimental city.

I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.

We're [New York] the world's second home, the place where every religion is practiced and every culture is celebrated.

Empowering people turns Wal-Mart's culture into a competitive advantage.

The terrorists provide an outlet where with just one action, a raped woman can go from being a source of dishonour to her family to being a source of pride in a culture of martyrdom.

I don't like the celebrity gossip culture, and I certainly don't want to contribute to it. I don't care about the Kardashians, or any of them.

An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

The whole appeal of dance music is being liberated because music is liberating and it's not about club culture or the social aspect of playing the mating game or whatever you're doing at a club. It's more about the euphoric aspect of listening to music.

It seems that the Internet is setting the standard for almost everything. I can't imagine having something like punk rock happen where an entire culture is doing one thing. It's not like all the kids in England are discovering the Stooges and the Ramones at the same time. All the kids in England are discovering every band that has ever existed. I can't imagine there being one huge cultural moment like there was in the past. Everything ends up being kind of postmodern.