Culture Quotes

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

~ Ze Frank

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

~ Lydia Millet

If I were given a choice between two films and one was dark and explored depraved, troubled or sick aspects of our culture, I would always opt for that over the next romantic comedy.

~ David Schwimmer

All of the songs my grandparents and parents listened to are called boleros - they're all love songs. They're about giving your heart to a person. It's a culture that is so romantic and passionate, and that's something that I'm very proud of. We grew up with nothing, so we just want to live a life full of love.

~ Camila Cabello

Romantic Orientalism was fascinated by the color and excitement of a powerful culture, and nearly always approached its subject with love.

~ Kage Baker

My own contentious relationship with gaming continued through high school and college: I still enjoyed playing games from time to time, but I always found myself pushed away by the sexism that permeated gaming culture. There were constant reminders that I didn't really belong.

~ Anita Sarkeesian

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

~ Edward T. Hall

The relationship between East and West needs to be and can be fixed via pop culture.

~ Wang Leehom

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

~ Lady Gaga

I used to define success as being able to produce any result you wanted, whether it was a relationship, weight-loss, being a millionaire, impacting the culture, changing society, whatever it might be - it might be homelessness, whatever - and lately, I've redefined success as 'fulfilling your soul's purpose.'

~ Jack Canfield

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

~ Elisabeth Shue

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

~ Graham Joyce

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

~ Richard Dawkins

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

~ Edward Hirsch

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

~ Edward Hirsch

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

~ Randall Jarrell

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

~ Ignazio Silone

Culture makes all men gentle.

~ Menander

One effect of an individualistic culture that's poor at instilling mutual respect is that people jump more quickly to anger or violence.

~ Geoff Mulgan

The great thing about celebrity culture is that they can't seem to stop themselves from displaying their ridiculous behaviour. I feel it's my job as a serious investigative journalist to witness all kinds of behaviour and then report back to the audience through the prism of my own anger and bitterness.

~ Kathy Griffin

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

~ Rowan Williams

I think that our culture is doing something to women - let's say women in their late 30s and 40s and probably even 50s, - where they really are expected to keep this insane level of fitness and youth. I find that just a real waste of women's lives. I really do think that.

~ Sarah Dunn

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

~ John Podhoretz

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

~ Mary Douglas

Culture change means we will do things differently.

~ Satya Nadella

The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?

~ Damon Albarn

Our culture does not teach us this, but what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. If you cheat in Vegas, it comes right home with you. If you cheat in Vegas, you walk home as a cheater. You lie awake at a night a cheater. You cannot escape it.

~ Tom Shadyac

I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.

~ Spike Lee

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.

~ Gaylord Nelson

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

~ Pat Buchanan

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

~ Jeremy Rifkin

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

~ Elie Wiesel

A multicultural society does not reject the culture of the other but is prepared to listen, to see, to dialogue and, in the final analysis, to possibly accept the other's culture without compromising its own.

~ Reuven Rivlin

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

~ Tom Brokaw

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

~ Lionel Trilling

Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?

~ Rose George

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

~ R. D. Laing

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

~ Ian Mackaye

Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.

~ Jonathan Sacks