George Saunders Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

  George Saunders

  Average, Guy, Culture

  "This Week in Fiction: George Saunders" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. October 4, 2012.

• A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

  George Saunders

  People, Survival, Watches

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.14, A&C Black

• The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

  George Saunders

  Pain, Kindness, Law

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.55, A&C Black

• There's this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting - which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.

  George Saunders

  Self, Ceilings, Culture

  "George Saunders on Trump, Mystery, and Why He Rejects Social Media". Interview with Catherine Woodiwiss, sojo.net. August 30, 2016.

• Both [Donald] Trump and Bernie [Sanders] got to this idea of the vanishing middle class sooner and with more passion than more mainstream politicians, and benefited from it. The difference, of course, is that Bernie understood this in a more compassionate framework, and talked about it in conjunction with a revitalization of another part of the American project, which is the notion that we are all created equal, and that our laws and culture and action ought to reflect that.

  George Saunders

  Passion, Law, Class

  Source: sojo.net

• This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

  George Saunders

  Reading, Acceptance, Thinking

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

• I know what it feels like to be in that middle and lower-middle class, and feel like the culture is passing you by; it translates into a great sense of personal frustration that can then morph into political frustration.

  George Saunders

  Frustration, Class, Political

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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