Cultural Capital Quotes & Sayings

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. — Owen Jones

To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life. — Susan T. Fiske

In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right of the textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable. The "planet" is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous - an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction - the toughest task in the diaspora. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Human capital analysis starts with the assumption that individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs. Benefits include cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, while costs usually depend mainly on the foregone value of the time spent on these investments. — Gary Becker

the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the "era of mass [book] reading" was a brief "anomaly" in our intellectual history: "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class." The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the "power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital" or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of "an increasingly arcane hobby. — Anonymous

VanessaPlace Inc. is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. What is poetry really worth? What is poetry's purpose - personally, culturally, politically, financially? VanessaPlace offers a language-based solution to these and other dilemmas facing the culture business today. The poetry-products of VanessaPlace turn cultural capital into capitalized culture through a game-changing, dynamic shift of focus from manifesto to manifestation. — Vanessa Place

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. — Susan Jacoby

The ability of individuals to extract wealth from society by profiting from land also leads to cultural degeneration and a loss of social cohesion over time... In general, as the value of land increases, the return on capital tends to decrease comparatively, which discourages business owners from investing in capital goods and private enterprise... Resources flow away from endeavours that can create jobs, produce wealth, and enliven society, and instead flow into land speculation. — Martin Adams

Content that's generated out of America, whether it be film or music, has, in my opinion, much greater impact in sustaining our credibility and our place as a cultural capital. This is our great export. — Lyor Cohen

The accumulation of cultural capital - the acquisition of knowledge - is the key to social mobility. — Michael Gove

Just think what will happen when the tournament is over and all the visitors have gone. The residents of Moscow, crowded by the housing crisis, will flee to your magnificent city. The capital will be transferred automatically to Vasyuki. The government will move here. Vasyuki will be renamed New Moscow, and Moscow will be Old Vasyuki. Leningraders and Kharkovians will grind their teeth, but they won't be able to do a thing about it. New Moscow will become the elegant cultural center of Europe, and soon, of the whole world. — Ilya Ilf

One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital. — Ron Chernow

It is said, that South Indian Music, as known today, flourished in Deogiri the capital city of the Yadavas in the middle ages, and that after the invasion and plunder of the city by the Muslims, the entire cultural life of the city took shelter in the Carnatic Empire of Vijayanagar under the reign of Krishnadevaraya. Thereafter, the music — Gaurav Mishra

In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London's mall for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later ... Let's not go there. — Mark Steyn

Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. — Douglass North

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. — Madison Smartt Bell

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid
labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved. — Silvia Federici

When Clinton took office, members of that community still faced a host of legal and cultural barriers. Sodomy laws banned same-sex acts, even in the privacy of one's bedroom, in more than half of the country's states plus the nation's capital. — Ann Bausum

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers. — David Henry Hwang

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages. — David Dinkins

The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so. — Tom Vanderbilt

In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade". — Herbert Schiller

Jeddah is the natural cultural capital, an old fortified port on the Red Sea, the home of merchants and immigrants. Jeddah is historic, confident, less threatened by new ideas. Riyadh today is bible-belt fierce, and brash. — Patrick Tom Notestine

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world? — Robert Wilson

The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. — Charles Eisenstein

It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed - deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist - reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence. — Gary Chartier

I think it's very, very important that people outside the capital cities, not just Sydney and Melbourne but also Brisbane Perth Adelaide and so on, have the greatest access to the best cultural experiences they can in both the performing arts and the visual arts. — George Brandis

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature's God in America and China's Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington. — Patrick Mendis

Lyotard addresses... in Postmodern Fables... [that] ideas of difference, alterity and multiculturalism have become nothing more than streams of cultural capital, streams which themselves fashion, and are fashioned by, the demands of the global market. Hence, the following irony: 'What cultural capitalism has found is the marketplace of singularities'. The result of this discovery, which even reduces the 'postmodern' celebration of difference or otherness to a marketable strategy, is that ideas are stripped of their intrinsic value (value-rationality) and are judged by their value as commodities. This leads to the production of thought that is itself devoid of difference, for streams of cultural capital 'must all go in the right direction' and 'must converge'. Global capitalism, while appearing to affirm the potentiality of cultural differentiation, in fact subordinates difference and alterity to an instrumental logic of exchange, performance and control. — Nicholas Gane

I have analyzed the peculiarity of cultural capital, which we should in fact call informational capital to give the notion its full generality, and which itself exists in three forms, embodied, objectified, or institutionalized. — Pierre Bourdieu

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation - becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure - as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form. — The Invisible Committee

The cultural capital American Christianity has amassed simply cannot be leveraged where it matters most. — James Davison Hunter

You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it's your family, peers, or co-workers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you. (205) — Tanner Colby

Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too. — J.L. Granatstein