George Steiner Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

  George Steiner

  Morning, Men, Play

  Language and Silence preface (1967)

• It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

  George Steiner

  Past, Mirrors, Other Cultures

  George Steiner (1974). “In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture”, p.3, Yale University Press

• The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

  George Steiner

  Spring, Unique, Men

• There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

  George Steiner

  Culture, Noise, Gregariousness

  The Daily Telegraph, May 23, 1989.

• Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.

  George Steiner

  Western Culture, Three, Consciousness

  "In Bluebeard's Castle". Book by George Steiner, 1971.

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