Philistines Quotes - Page 2

• Next to the defeated politician, the writer is the most vocal and inventive griper on earth. He sees hardship and unfairness wherever he looks. His agent doesn’t love him (enough). The blank sheet of paper is an enemy. The publisher is a cheapskate. The critic is a philistine. The public doesn’t understand him. His wife doesn’t understand him. The bartender doesn’t understand him.

  Peter Mayle

  Wife, Enemy, Agents

  FaceBook post by Peter Mayle from May 29, 2011

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• You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Mean, Long, Razors

  W. Somerset Maugham (2008). “The Razor's Edge”, p.305, Random House

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• Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.

  Thomas Harris

  Thinking, Answers, Lions

  Thomas Harris (1999). “Hannibal”

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• He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Beauty, Skins, Firsts

  Louis Kronenberger (1972). “A Mania for Magnificence”

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• The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.

  Georg Brandes

  Men, Culture, Burden

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.6, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Art, Hate, Culture

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• The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three...And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Live Life, Mean, Years

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• That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.

  Nick Hornby

  Book, Heart, Optimism

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• I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Motivation, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Why can't the black man have a God? What's so wrong when a black man says his God will protect him form his white foe? If Jehovah can slay Philistines for the Jews, why can't Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro?

  Malcolm X

  Men, White, Black

  Source: teachingamericanhistory.org

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• I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

  Charles Lamb

  Wall, Tired, Air

  Charles Lamb, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1838). “The letters of Charles Lamb, with a sketch of his life. The poetical works”, p.196

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• Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory?

  Abbott Eliot Kittredge

  Laughter, Echoes, Church

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 147, 1895.

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• If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

  Lionel Trilling

  Artist, Bourgeoisie, Doe

  "Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition", ed. William Philips, 1985.

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• I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

  Michael Longley

  Art, Thinking, Environment

  Scottish Review of Books Interview, www.scottishreviewofbooks.org. October 19, 2009.

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• Here is an example to help you understand the efficacy of the Rosary. You remember the story of David who vanquished Goliath. What steps did the young Israelite take to overthrow the giant? He struck him in the middle of the forehead with a pebble from his sling. If we regard the Philistine as representing evil and all its powers: heresy, impurity, pride, we can consider the little stones from the sling capable of overthrowing the enemy as symbolizing the Aves of the Rosary.

  Columba Marmion

  Pride, Evil, Enemy

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• I'm quite squeamish, really. I'm philistine and unsophisticated - not because of my great discerning palate but other reasons. Some are moral grounds, some texture.

  Ricky Gervais

  Texture, Moral, Reason

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• Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Simple, May, Trinidad

  "Reluctant hero" by Caryl Phillips, www.theguardian.com. Ocotber 11, 2001.

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• It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'

  Robert Winston

  Thinking, People, Laughing

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• It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

  Germaine Greer

  Dream, Book, Men

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• Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Oval, Rounds

  1967 Interview in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Spring.

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• I could go on and on. But that is just what gardening is, going on and on. My philistine of a husband often told with amusement how a cousin when asked when he expected to finish his garden replied 'Never, I hope'. And that, I think, applies to all true gardeners.

  Margery Fish

  Cousin, Husband, Garden

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• The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Ignorance, Achievement

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• It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Mean, Men, Giving

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• You all have learned reliance
  On the sacred teachings of Science,
  So I hope, through life, you will never decline
  In spite of philistine Defiance
  To do what all good scientists do.
  Experiment.
  Make it your motto day and night.
  Experiment.
  And it will lead you to the light.

  Cole Porter

  Teaching, Learning, Science

  Cole Porter (1954). “103 lyrics”

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• Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

  Susan Sontag

  Real, Book, Ideas

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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