Culture Quotes

From all accounts, it seems the faithful opposition is reduced to Gideon's 300. The day has arrived for Christians to engage the battle...From now on, true Christians will engage the battle of ideas in academy. The time for giving up ground is over. Now we must fight. We must engage the [B]iblical worldview vigorously in the world of great literature. The greatests wars ever fought in history are not those fought by sword or artillery. The greatest battles are engaged in the realm of ideas

~ Kevin Swanson

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

~ Sara Sheridan

The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

~ Robert M. Edsel

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.

~ Noel Ignatiev

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

~ Clifford Geertz

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

~ Carl Sagan

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.

~ Abdus Salam

It would be easier to get a computer to cry than to get Estonians to share their innermost feelings.

~ Lembit Öpik

The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself.

~ Douglas Wilson

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

~ Emma Goldman

Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.

~ Robert Fulghum

Cultures should not be like water that dissolves them evenly, but like colours that stand out distinctly.

~ Vinita Kinra

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

~ David Halberstam

The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.

~ Neel Burton

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

~ Randy Alcorn

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.

~ Halldór Laxness

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.

~ Tom Standage

Honor the old but allow for innovation.

~ Beau Sides

So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit in one of those all-night-into-mornings cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium from L.A. to New York and all north and south and east and west and in between – and i know there must be a lot of kids who aren't sleeping but listening to their muse – iPad-ing and YouTubing...and the final shore ain't no shore at all but a long ether cable cyperspacing us together – cutting the continent in half.

~ Joseph Maviglia

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.

~ Junot Díaz

They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When people lack true culture or are devoid of innovative ideas, they speak about wine, various brands of alcoholic beverages, or the quality of soap.

~ Dimitris Mita

The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

~ Iain M. Banks

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

~ Konrad Lorenz

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.

~ Neal Stephenson

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

~ Konrad Lorenz

Recently I've been dreamingof cursing old peoplewith little provocation,because their culturehas a long history of enslaving,raping, and segregating,and they have special lightswhich prevent us from dancing.

~ Matthew Rohrer

Amish recognize each others' horse like we do our friends' car.

~ Brenda Nixon

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

~ Allen Tate

Where the establishment emphasized humility, prudence, lineage, meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains&self-betterment

~ Christopher Hayes

People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form.

~ Dor Bahadur Bista

The Swartzentruber Order is the most conservative on the Amish spectrum. Amish people have differences just like any culture.

~ Brenda Nixon

Culture is more important than vision. Some leaders have great vision, but have created a toxic culture where that vision will never happen.

~ Phil Cooke

To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The ideal of a well-stocked mind aiming at excellence in all walks of life has been replaced by the dream of a well-stocked wine cellar, the cellar now being a specially made wine cooler strategically placed in one’s house, to be viewed by even the most unobservant visitor.

~ Dimitris Mita

learn to experience and learn to respect ,i love my culture and i respect iti m proud to be Xhosa

~ Saziso Lucas

Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.

~ Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy