As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit.

 —Seneca

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.

—Margaret Mead

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

—Frank Lloyd Wright

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

—John F. Kennedy

In a society where anything goes, eventually everything will.

—G.K. Chesterton

When one looks back over human existence, however, it is very evident that all culture has developed through an initial resistance against adaptation to the reality in which man finds himself.

—Beatrice Hinkle

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.

—Simone Weil

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

—Pablo Picasso

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

—Karl Kraus

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

—Albert Camus

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

—T.S. Eliot