Liberal Arts Movie Quotes

The cinema is, after all, the most timid of the arts. It never sets trends, it merely reflects them. The harm has been done long before the movies set cameras on the scene. Warring teen-age gangs antedated Rebel Without A Cause , at least in the United States; and the most infamous teen-age killer in Philippine history operated during the liberation times, long before James Dean was heard of.

SHOHAKU OKUMURA: We human beings have the ability to think of things not in front of us. We create stories in our minds in which the hero or heroine is always us. We evaluate what happened in the past, we analyze our present conditions, and we anticipate what should happen in the future. This is an important ability. Because of it, we can create art, study history, and have visions of the future. Without it, we couldn’t write or enjoy poems or movies. Almost all of human culture depends on seeing things not in front of our eyes. This means almost all culture is fictitious. Our ability to create such fictions is the reality of our lives. We cannot live without it. But this ability leads to many problems. We have certain expectations of our stories. If things go as we expect, we feel like heavenly beings, but if not, we feel we’re in hell. Often we desire more and more without ever experiencing satisfaction, like hungry ghosts. It’s important to see that it’s not life that causes suffering but our expectation that life should be the way we want. We can’t live without expectation, but if we can handle the feelings caused by the difference between our expectations and reality, that’s liberation. Zazen practice as taught by Dogen Zenji, Sawaki Roshi, and Uchiyama Roshi is taking a break from watching the screen of our stories and sitting down on the ground of the reality that exists before our imagination. When we’re not taken in by our fictitious world, we can enjoy and learn from the stories we make.

the disappearance of an audience that had supported experimentation and made such works financial, as well as critical, successes. The decline of liberal-arts teaching in schools and colleges meant that the new audience was less cultured and intellectually oriented; wedded to television and movies, it wanted to be entertained rather than challenged.

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

GIVE ME THE SONGS OF A NATION” Sing for joy to God our strength; shout aloud to the God of Jacob! Begin the music, strike the timbrel, play the melodious harp and lyre. Psalm 81:1–2 Let these two quotations wash over you:           “I am the art in your arthouses, the ideas in your institutions, the laws in your land, the message in your movies, the thoughts of your teachers, the values your kids value. I affect you. Do you affect me?”—Culture And also this one, from the fifth-century BC Greek musician Damon of Athens:           Give me the songs of a nation, and it matters not who writes its laws. I wish more of us—especially our politicians—realized that ideas have consequences in the real world. When we embrace certain ideals in our movies and songs (sex without restraint, for example, which happened during the “free love” 1970s), it affects our culture in ways that rules and regulations can’t undo. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, don’t let movies, songs, and the arts be dominated by liberals. Instead, arm your Christian children and grandkids with a solid worldview and encourage them to enter these areas boldly and with excellence.

Liberals dominate most of the leading opinion-making areas of American life-- journalism, the movie and television industries, academia, the publishing industry, the legal profession, the mainline churches, and the arts. Conservatives dominate talk radio, evangelical churches, and have Fox News, but that hardly evens things out. By contrast with liberal dominance in the opinion-making elite, the playing field is more or less level with regard to spending on political campaigns-- on average, Democrats and Republicans spend approximately the same amount. Nether party has the massive, structural advantages when it comes to campaign spending that the Democrats have in the broader political and ideological arena. Without the relatively level playing field of campaign spending, left-leaning opinion-makers would be able to virtually monopolize American political discourse. So the Obama administration's and leading Democratic politicians' over-the-top reaction to Citizens United was not because they suddenly became Boy Scouts interested in improving the American political system by reducing the relevance of money-- indeed, in 2008 Obama, breaking a campaign promise, became the first major-party candidate to decline federal campaign funds and the spending limits that come with those funds. His campaign wound up outspending McCain's by the largest margin in history. Rather, the Democrats understand that reducing the funds available to all candidates will disproportionately harm the Republicans, because Republicans have fewer "free" ways to get their message out.