Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy in Popular Culture

Famous quotes containing the words dante alighieri, popular, comedy, culture, alighieri, dante and/or divine:

“This miserable state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.”
—Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
—Monty Python’s Flying Circus. first broadcast Sept. 22, 1970. Michael Palin, in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV comedy series)

“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

“I wept not, so to stone within I grew.”
—Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)