Culture Quotes

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.

~ Kate O'neill

To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you’re also non-threatening and slightly useless.

~ Hannah Brooks Olsen

Liberals and conservatives tend to view the economy in purely materialistic terms. They make growth, security, and prosperity ends in themselves. They exalt enlightened self-interest. They tell us that productive work is the fundamental source of human dignity.But for Christians, (Greg) Forster insists, the materialistic view is a lie. The modern economic man is prone to workaholism, Envy, greed, anxiety, and a host of other ills. The great task for Christians is to become, broadly speaking, innovative entrepreneurs: people who are not only more productive in their work then there would be leaving neighbors, but also more creative, generous, honest, and humane.

~ Greg Forster

As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized — let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don’t necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation — a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor’s office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist — in front of an audience.

~ Knute Berger

The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.

~ Caitlin Doughty

Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed…

~ Terence Mckenna

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

~ Stefan Molyneux

There are many themes found in the Book of Psalms that are generally not found in modern music. These include the fear of God, the righteousness and justice of God, the sovereignty of God, the judgement of God, the evil of sin, spiritual and physical warfare, the arch enemies of the Christian, the destruction of the wicked, the reality of hell, the blessedness of the church, the vicious attacks upon the church, the commandments of God, the dominion of David’s son, and so on. Without the backdrop of these truths, the themes of love, mercy, faith, and salvation become largely meaningless.

~ Kevin Swanson

Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

The biblical counselor must always remember that the ROOT problem is deeper than skin; it is sin. The ultimate cure is not culture, but Christ.

~ James Macdonald

in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.

~ Joseph Campbell

Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

~ Caitlin Doughty

It is a wise man who, when his spouse asks, How does this look? can answer honestly without upsetting her.

~ Tsihugwa Kikuyu

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.

~ James Macdonald

The conscience is a right mix of instinct, reason and culture. The conscience itself is not a truth but it has an ability to access the truth. But the very conscience is assembled only by the reason.

~ Thiruman Archunan

Marriage is the best compromise between nature and culture.

~ Thiruman Archunan

Spiritualism exits only for individuals. Reason is born when two men interact, addition of more and more members necessitates the spreading of the reason culminating as culture. Hence a culture is as dynamic as the reason. The nature of the reason is the nature of the spirit within for some and instinct for some others.

~ Thiruman Archunan

Culture is corporate character.

~ Pearl Zhu

Culture is like water in the sea, it can either keep the business ship afloat or drag it down and sink it.

~ Pearl Zhu

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

~ Ryan Lilly

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.

~ Caitlin Doughty

Light always trumps darkness. It always has, and it always will. Therefore... if you believe that your world is darkening...if you believe that the culture of your nation is growing dimmer by the year...don't blame it on the dark! Darkness is only doing what darkness does.If darkness is winning the battles, my friend, it is because light is not doing it's job. You are light. So wake up. Wake up.

~ Andy Andrews

Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.

~ Neil Postman

The theater has been called the pulse of the people.

~ Abigail Adams

You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.

~ Terence Mckenna

They (evangelicals)could enrich their faith (with C.S. Lewis) without diluting it, and engage secular culture in ways other than through reasoned argument. Lewis allowed his readers to grasp and benefit from the importance of images and stories for the life of faith, without losing sight of the robustly reasonable nature of the Christian gospel”.

~ Hafiz

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

~ Jess Walter

Simply put, here amid the kingdoms of this world we have no continuing city. That’s why we dare not become attached to the passing values of any human culture.

~ Harold L. Senkbeil

There’s plenty of emphasis on success in our culture, but we have to help people focus on significance as well.

~ Morton Shaevitz

try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

~ Steven Hall

When you travel, appreciate the culture of the people in the land.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When I was young, I thought classical music was only the background noise for cartoons.

~ Ben Carson

With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them.The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger, Them got smaller. Them now might mean anyone in any other country. This is a common Them in America, and a Them that only (light use of this word) consists of 95% of the world. Another common Them in America is anyone who isn’t Christian, which is a measly 68% of the world, or roughly 4.8 Billion Thems.In a relatively short amount of time, Us went from being a fraction of a percent of humanity and Them the rest, to some people experiencing an Us of more than two billion other people, far more than were ever alive at the onset of Us and Them.

~ Sam Killermann

There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.

~ Ben Horowitz

For every 100 women who earn a bachelors degree, 75 men do so. For every 100 American women who earn a Masters degree, 66 American men do so. For every 100 females, ages 20 to 24, who commit suicide, 624 males do so. For every 100 women, ages 18 to 21, in correctional facilities, 1430 men are so confined.

~ Mitch Pearlstein

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

~ Begoña Aretxaga

Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as a “Christian” movie because movies, though often remarkable pieces of art full of symbolism, commentary and meaning, are not sentient beings. Even the animated ones are, strictly speaking, still things, inanimate objects lacking eternal souls, incapable of feeling emotions or making decisions.

~ Jelani Greenidge

Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be “Christian” is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the movie isn’t an overt endorsement not only of faith itself but Judeo-Christian morality and/or Protestant culture, then it’s not “Christian.

~ Jelani Greenidge