Milan Kundera Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Struggle, Book

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pt. 1, sec. 2 (1980) (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

• The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Book, People

• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Children, Race

• Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

  Milan Kundera

  Culture, Avalanches, Madness

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". 1988.

• War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

  Milan Kundera

  War, Fighting, Years

  "Immortality". Book by Milan Kundera, 1990.

• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Race, Generations

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