Culture Quotes

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.

~ Jaron Lanier

Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.

~ Lawrence Lessig

Art for Art’s Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.

~ Lara Biyuts

...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.

~ Jonah Lehrer

[O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.

~ Naomi Klein

The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition could be explained and the upset state of the human condition compassionately understood and thus defended that debate could not take place.

~ Jeremy Griffith

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

~ Sara Sheridan

[I]f you don't feel or look rich, you don't necessarily feel the same sense of obligation that a traditional rich person does or should: Noblesse oblige is, after all, dependent on a classical idea of who is and is not the nobility. As that starts to fall away, obligation--to culture, to the future, to each other--begins to disappear too.

~ Ellen Cushing

It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.

~ George Orwell

What if we saw differences in cultures, in moral choices, and in belief as reasons to engage people instead of excuses to disengage and quickly exit?

~ Holly Sprink

Tradition is the code that keeps change in lock. If you refuse change, you are likely to rust and guess the cause; that long held way of doing things.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

He was the old breed of Filipino, almost extinct, who required that he deserve what he received; who would feel guilt, not only shame or embarrassment; who accounted for each day in the office and observed public trust as if it were a word of God. But even God was nowhere. The new theology proclaimed him dead. Long live Man! Love live Me!

~ Linda Ty-Casper

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

~ Oscar Wilde

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

~ Susan Sontag

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

~ M.h. Abrams

And that is to say, of course, that you can read a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

~ Richard Mitchell

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

~ Mark Twain

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

~ E.l. Konigsburg

Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.

~ Paul C. Nagel

People are talking high of Thiruvalluvar. But in practice they do not respect his teachings. They act against him and disregard him.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers.

~ Charles Murray

The African continent has so many stories to tell, it's about time they are told, by them - not us.

~ Akilnathan Logeswaran

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul.

~ Mark Cantrell

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.

~ Wallace Stegner

Gulliver was soon being read from the cabinet council to the nursery.

~ John Gay

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There’s a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication. An inchoate impulse forms into a feeling that resembles but can never match the dreamy intensity of the original impulse. This feeling then articulates itself, but the words at best approximate a shadow of the feeling. I speak or write these words, and of course the person who receives them brings to that receiving his or her own connotations: Cinnamon, for example, may conjure different memories and may mean something different for you than for me. These words may then settle into feelings, leading finally, perhaps, to some impulse on your part. With so many layers of interpretation, it's no wonder we so often misunderstand each other. And this is between two people who speak the same language. How much more difficult understanding can be, then, when the people do not share a common cultural background, or native tongue? How much more than this may we misunderstand when we then hear a dog speak, or a tree or stone?

~ Derrick Jensen

That's very important about stories. They touch something that is human in us and is probably unchanging. Perhaps this is why the important knowledge is passed through stories. It's what holds a culture together. Culture has a story, and every person in it participates in that story. They world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts.

~ Krista Tippett

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

~ Leo Tolstoy

People from context cultures tend to view personal bonds and informal agreements as far more binding than any formal contract. People from content cultures don't believe the deal is finalized until everyone has signed on the dotted line. And therein lies the potential for conflict.

~ Carol Kinsey Goman

Nothing mitigates the throes of depression like a steaming plate of spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce and grated parmasan cheese, with a good fresh bread to wipe up.

~ Paul Clayton

Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.

~ Abiola Abrams

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

~ Wendell Berry

Building a prayer culture takes time. . . and relentless pressure over time. I often say that it is much more a crock pot than a microwave.

~ Daniel Henderson

॥दोहा॥श्रीगुरु चरन सरोज रज, निज मनु मुकुरु सुधारि।बरनउँ रघुबर बिमल जसु, जो दायकु फल चारि॥DohaWith the dust of guru’s lotus feet having,I cleanse the mirror of my soul sparkling,Raghuvar’s spotless glory I be singing,The four fruits of life it ever is giving.- 303 -

~ Munindra Misra

She tried to explain to them it wasn't the place that made people uncultured but their attitudes.

~ Vivian Arend

We live in a culture of violence.

~ Bryant Mcgill

By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.

~ Marcia Conner

Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.

~ Stuart D.b. Picken