Culture Quotes

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

~ T.s. Eliot

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves.

~ Tim Keel

. . . I realized with a growing and startling sense of clarity that the seminary was educating and training me for a world that no longer existed. Moreover, the posture of this particular brand of Christianity toward the surrounding culture was one of enormous suspicion and at times hostility. It seemed that part of this evolving designation involved a posture of entrenchment and argument toward culture. But I loved culture. I loved the freedom to engage with people for the purpose of friendship and dialogue, not simply evangelism.

~ Tim Keel

Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the New Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to - the food we cook and consume; the music we purchase and practice; the movies we watch and make; the enterprises we earn our paychecks from and invest our wealth in - be identified as the glory and honor of our cultural tradition? Or will they be remembered as mediocrities at best, dead-ends at worst? This is not the same as asking whether we are making christian culture.

~ Andy Crouch

Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal Christian culture without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church.

~ John D. Zizioulas

Growing up I sometimes imagined that for Christ's return perhaps He would appear as 'Black Jesus' to white people and 'White Jesus' to black people just to screw with the racists.

~ Criss Jami

Rather than trying to prove our masculinity, we need to accept who we are in the spirit of the gospel. Instead of trying to live up to some cultural standard of manhood, we need to accept God’s grace, which says, “I accept you just as you are.” It is culture, not God, that alienates those who do not live up to the existing, narrow definition of manhood.

~ Nate Pyle

We need encouragement, not sermonizing, and we need clear-eyed acknowledgement of the situation, not a sanctified gloss that pushes us toward saying, 'I see I must not admit my pain because, after all, I'm a Christian. I'll just have to cover it up.

~ David Jeremiah

Albania’s future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe

~ Ismail Kadare

Modern culture anesthetizes the mind while mainlining the soul with emotional experiences that keep the worldling believing he is really living.

~ Jim Berg

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.

~ Mordecai Richler

The nature of your work does not have to be the culture of your team.

~ Janna Cachola

Convincing a team to believe in a vision takes sponsorship, commitment, and strong leadership. Commanding Excellence demonstrates how to create a culture that everyone commits to from the boardroom to the battlefield. A must-read for anyone who works in a goal-oriented environment

~ Dave Jones

[On action filled leadership] Telling your team what to do is showmanship.Showing people how to do it is leadership. Leading for the purpose of visual effect will not accomplish the vision.

~ Janna Cachola

We live in a world in which everything seems to needed now and working quickly is normally viewed as a positive attribute in the workplace...Do not let yourself become too frazzled and stressed by doing everything at high speed.As I have coached hundreds of individuals in the workplace, I have discovered that we waste precious time by delaying and procrastinating. We might know that the work is very urgent and important but we still might find ourselves being slow to start the task.

~ Nigel Cumberland

Standards are not established by your proclamations they are established by your routines.

~ T Jay Taylor

The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people.

~ Geraldine Brooks

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

~ Sherry Turkle

Staffers tend to mimic their bosses, to take their key from them.

~ Chris Matthews

The show became its own little world, with its own internal rhythm and high standards.

~ Dick Van Dyke

The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.

~ H.w. Brands

Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.

~ David Halberstam

People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

~ Albert Camus

The only interesting ideas are heresies

~ Susan Sontag

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

~ Robert Hughes

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.

~ Umberto Eco

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

~ Steve Turner

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

~ Naomi Klein

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)

~ David N. Elkins

He who wars against the arts, wars not against nations, but against all mankind.

~ Arthur Urbane Dilley

The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.

~ Aberjhani

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

~ M.f.k. Fisher

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.

~ Rudyard Kipling

A museum is a place where nothing was lost, just rediscovered…

~ Nanette L. Avery

I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and SaidaI am from the ground underneath my home I am from the trees, the cedar treeI come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim...Kassar and KassemI come from happiness and cultureFrom Habibi and HayeteI am from all religionsI am from the room beneath the stars.

~ Zeina Kassem

Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.

~ László Krasznahorkai

cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything.

~ Steven Pinker

We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.

~ Teresa R. Funke