Culture Quotes

..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance.

~ Will Durant

I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests?

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

When a stranger on the street makes a sexual comment, he is making a private assessment of me public. And though I’ve never been seriously worried that I would be attacked, it does make me feel unguarded, unprotected. Regardless of his motive, the stranger on the street makes an assumption based on my physique: He presumes I might be receptive to his unpoetic, unsolicited comments. (Would he allow a friend to say “Nice tits” to his mother? His sister? His daughter?) And although I should know better, I, too, equate my body with my soul and the result, at least sometimes, is a deep shame of both. Rape is a thousand times worse: The ultimate theft of self-control, it often leads to a breakdown in the victim’s sense of self-worth. Girls who are molested, for instance, often go on to engage in risky behavior—having intercourse at an early age, not using contraception, smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. This behavior, it seems to me, is at least in part because their self-perception as autonomous, worthy human beings in control of their environment has been taken from them.

~ Leora Tanenbaum

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

~ Zoltan Istvan

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

~ Zoltan Istvan

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The height of human achievement and glory, Muhammad.

~ Pringle Kennedy

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?

~ Gustave Le Bon

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

~ Octavio Paz

Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.

~ Thomas J. Scheff

Oftentimes in a society when people of a certain type, whether individual or a group, are subconsciously portrayed by the media as abnormal, they also slowly, subconsciously become enemies of that society due to feelings of cultural guilt. Ultimately by this the inflated media is an enemy of its very own cause.

~ Criss Jami

While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.

~ James Clavell

When psychologists Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Ayse Ayçiçegi compared U.S. and Turkish samples, they found that having an orientation inconsistent with societal values is a risk factor for poor mental health. The findings support what the researchers call the personality-culture clash hypothesis: Psychological adjustment depends on the degree of match between personality and the values of surrounding society. To the extent that introverts feel the need to explain, apologize, or feel guilty about what works best for them, they feel alienated not only from society but from themselves.

~ Laurie A. Helgoe

Show me a culture where honesty is considered ridiculous, where nobody's ever accountable for anything, where anger gets admired as a sign of strength, and I'll show you a place where misery is permanent

~ Anthony Steyning

If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their to power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority---and this is the case in all modern cultures,---it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.

~ Sigmund Freud

For me ignorant is not illiterate or public, but is trying to review his culture ...You have to run away from them, they did not care what they read, but a number of what they read ...

~ Iridea

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

~ Idries Shah

When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare.

~ Martin E.p. Seligman

...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.

~ D.w. Winnicott

It's Unfair to be fair,For Life is unfair

~ Farley Maglaya

Many of the women in Los Angeles are part of the notorious gang culture, and they will forever have my gratitude for, you know, letting me live.

~ Jennifer Harrison

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

~ Antonio Gramsci

Women with dark skin are sharing selfies on social media after decades of being underrepresented in the mainstream media. From what I have observed much of the dark skin adoration on social media appears to come from us - black women. We tend to use the appreciation hashtags with our own pictures of photographs of dark skin women whom we feel are stunning. While I am loving this fierceness.. There is just one sidetone to this revolution: I feel as if we are much more appreciated if we show more skin. The timelines are filled with absolutely beautiful dark-skinned women but most sadly most of the time they are all oiled up and showing their body parts in different angles.Now, I am definitely in to art and as a model I know that this comes with the territory. But we most not forget that we are Queens.. We need to stop degrading ourselves for likes on the gram. You don't have to be naked to show the world you're beautiful.You my sister are an African Queen.I feel as if black women are only appreciated if they wear very provocative clothes or if they do naked photoshoots. To me, it's degrading and reminds me of the time that we couldn't ride the bus because we were black. Women were seen as servants. The black women that weren't servants were sex slaves.We are not objects, we are not meat and people need to stop looking at us as sex objects. BUT we need to start respecting ourselves first! A black woman is a woman first and it should not even be necessary to specify the colour but this is the society we live in and I feel like I had to share this.

~ Vanessa Ngoma

We are nothing but bricks from our cultural molds

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

~ Albert Camus

The journey was a worthwhile. We gain new insight into cultural diversity.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.

~ Jude Idada

Maintain a belief system that admits that all things are possible for those responsible to have them done. It's nothing to deny; whenever God calls us for a responsibility, he give the ability for us to respond to that responsibility!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

He laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.

~ George Rivorie

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

~ Harold Bloom

He wanted the show to be fresh to audiences 50 years down the line.

~ Dick Van Dyke

ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We’re a life cult. Rock ’n’ roll is a life force, and it’s joy as an act of defiance.

~ Bono

Fashion is simply a guideline for style-less people to appear stylish.

~ Criss Jami

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.

~ Max Mckeown

If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.

~ Max Mckeown

The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new genre based on a mixing of others. The potential for modern-day muses is as vast as individual creativity.

~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Consuming the content and culture of creatives does not make one a creative. Creating makes a creative.

~ Ryan Lilly

The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than owning material things. I also see art as something people will do rather than consume, and do it as a natural part of their lives; creative endeavors are a form of profound spiritual satisfaction.

~ Theodore Roszak