Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with environment.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does; or that his soul might die without his knowing it?

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.

As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.

As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.

Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.

Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.

When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can!

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Soft addictions are an alluring, seductive aspect of our culture - they are easy to attain and socially acceptable, they are even encouraged in many cases. Yet they are lethal to the spirit.

This is the culture you're raising your kids in. Don't be surprised if it blows up in your face.