The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts." This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.
Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.
A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines
Comment about about New Zealand after a visit.
'Philistines' was so beautiful, and it bored me to death. I never want to see another production where the rain splashes against a window and actors wander around in drab cardigans saying, 'I'm so bored.'
A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.
Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.