Quotes of: Philistine Keyword

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, December 1895 to May 1896

For Philistines like me, the mysteries of Washington can be both perplexing and wondrous.

David Harsanyi

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Vladimir Nabokov

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

Louis Dudek

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

V. S. Naipaul

Big George: What's a Philistine? Sally: Well, it's just a real dirty person.

Dead Man

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Matthew Arnold

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Pauline Kael

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are of...

Conrad Black

Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.

Ambrose Bierce

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

Colin Firth

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I'm a philistine. I like the good life too much; I'm not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

Anthony Hopkins

It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting.

Felicity Huffman

[Just before the big game] Preacher Purl: And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen.

Hoosiers

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

Brideshead Revisited

Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity— saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched agai...

Mencken and Nietzsche

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.

The Razor's Edge

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

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsine...

Brideshead Revisited

A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect yo...

Virginia Postrel

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky