quotations about culture
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
CARLOS FUENTES
Myself with Others
take a look outside
those lively arts are on the slide
and culture's just a bore
when you're angry, young and poor
THE DAMNED
"Lively Arts"
The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE).
DANIEL QUINN
Beyond Civilization
The state is the nursing mother of human culture.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Nation and the Ethics of War and Preparedness: An Address
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
EDWARD T. HALL
The Silent Language
Culture is a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member's behaviour and each member's interpretations of the "meaning" of other people's behavior.
HELEN SPENCER-OATEY
Culturally Speaking
The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.
MARIANNE E. NEIFERT
Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
JOEL SALATIN
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal
Culture is the way we live. It is the clothes we wear, the foods we eat, the language we speak, the stories we tell, and the ways we celebrate. It is the way we show our imaginations through art, music, and writing.
BOBBIE KALMAN
What Is Culture?
Culture would seem ... first and foremost, to be the knowledge of what makes man something other than an accident of the universe, be it by deepening his harmony with the world, or by the lucid consciousness of his revolt from it.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
attributed, Malraux : An Essay in Political Criticism
Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
In Defense of Letters
You have to taste a culture to understand it.
DEBORAH CATER
attributed, A Queen in the Kitchen
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.
NEIL POSTMAN
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The one thing that seems certain when trying to define culture is that there is no agreement on a single definition of the term.
ABEL ADEKOLA & BRUNO S. SERGI
Global Business Management
All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Prisms
Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own.
GEORGE L. JACKSON
Blood in My Eye
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
PETER KREEFT
Jesus-Shock
Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
To hide behind culture or tradition to justify anarchy is a gross insult to the very people whose culture or tradition may be paraded to glorify criminal conduct.
MAHENDRA CHAUDHRY
speech, Jul. 15, 2005
That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles--that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Untimely Meditations