Virginia Postrel

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 your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.

American Writer

Orson Welles

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

American Actor

Felicity Huffman

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.

American Actress

Rob Liefeld

Long before it was 'Raided' and 'Lost' with Indiana Jones, the Ark of the Covenant was originally stolen from the Israelites by The Philistines; The Ark of the Covenant was the nuclear bomb of its age: when activated, it was devastating.

Germaine Greer

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.

Australian Activist

Colin Firth

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.

British Actor

Anthony Hopkins

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.

Welsh Actor

V. S. Naipaul

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

Trinidadian Novelist

Louis Dudek

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

Canadian Poet

Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

American Novelist

Used disapprovingly to criticize someone's disinterest in culture.

Negative Connotation

What is 'cultured' can vary, so calling someone a philistine can be subjective.

Subjective Judgment

While offensive, it's informally used among friends as light teasing.

Colloquial Use

Emphasizes a lack of knowledge or care for cultural values and practices.

Cultural Ignorance

A philistine may not grasp or value intellectual efforts, not just art.

Beyond Aesthetics

Relates to the ancient people, crucial to understanding Biblical narratives.

Historical Context

Refers specifically to the historical group, not an insult in this context.

Not Modern Insult

Very old term used in religious and academic studies.

Religious Texts

 was not produced with a museum setting in mind. What happens to an artwork when it's taken out of its originally intended context? Take the example of Michelangelo's Statue of David, depicting the boy hero who slew the giant philistine, Goliath, armed with only his courage and his slingshot.

The many meanings of...

 that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways. There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic. There were some people who were a little less impressed. And I wasn't that impressed. And I don't -- call my palate a philistine palate --