Culture Quotes

I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.

~ Javier Marías

Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture.

~ Janet Poppendieck

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.

~ Thomas Mcguane

Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.

~ Kurt Eichenwald

When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

~ Robert Bringhurst

Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.

~ Veronica Hollinger

Enron would keep its unearned windfall, generated solely because David Duncan didn't know what he was doing.

~ Kurt Eichenwald

...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable.Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan's strings.p.338

~ Kurt Eichenwald

A eureka moment. It suddenly struck Mintz as so obvious. The executives entrusted with reviewing all of the LJM transactions- Causey, Buy, the board- approached their duties casually, giving everything just the onceover. They seemed to figure that somebody else was doing the tough analysis. But no one was.p.389

~ Kurt Eichenwald

In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality.p.403

~ Kurt Eichenwald

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.

~ Mark Miller

Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.

~ Semen Frank

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

~ Julia Glass

I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.

~ Rory Stewart

I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.

~ Tobias Jones

In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.

~ Maya Angelou

The teaching conundrum had been solved. Teaching evolves where the costs are outweighed by the inclusive fitness benefits that result from the tutor's relatives being more likely to acquire the valuable information. Teaching is not favored when the pupil can easily acquire the information on their own or through copying others. Nor is it favored when imparting traits that are difficult to learn, as teachers generally do not possess the information to pass on to their relatives. These restrictions typically lead to few circumstances under which teaching would be efficacious. Models that allow for cumulative cultural knowledge gain, however, suggest that teaching evolved in humans despite, rather than because of, our strong imitative capabilities, and primarily because cumulative culture renders otherwise difficult-to-acquire valuable information available to teach. The analyses suggest that human teaching and cumulative culture evolved together, through mutual reinforcement.

~ Kevin N. Laland

The fastest way to destroy a culture is to make it multicultural.

~ Robert Black

Celebrating Culture is celebrating existence.

~ Mahrukh

Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.

~ Cornel West

A Bombshell commands attention for her business with a strong culture, consistent branding, and simple, no-to-low cost marketing.

~ Amber Hurdle

Find another solution. That’s how you move toward success.

~ Amber Hurdle

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

~ Steven Pinker

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Religion, culture, education are all things that sound wonderful in theory. In practice, however, they are not so wonderful.

~ Marty Rubin

Do I have to admit that I'm half Cuban and half American,or should I go even further, and explainthat Dad's parents were born in the Ukraine,part of Soviet Russia?Or am I just entirely American,all the fractions left behindby immigration from faraway nations?

~ Margarita Engle

The Republic of Venice used to boast that, in the space of three months, it could know all the events of the Mediterranean. We see the astronauts, from the distance of a few feet, at the very moment they land on the moon. Unfortunately the news almost swamps us with its frequency and abundance. It doesn't give us time to reflect: we are so constantly amazed that gradually we lose our capacity for being surprised at anything, and we don't enjoy even beautiful things.

~ Pope John Paul I

It may sound exaggerated to say that the clash of civilizations and cultures as what we're witnessing in Europe between muslims and christians is necessary, but the alternative, an extremely arrogant and suppressive Europe, would eventually self-destroy itself, as it nearly did several times in the past centuries. The forced discipline on Europeans is violent for the present generation, unaware of its moral weaknesses and delusional supremacy, but necessary for future generations, that need to witness a more peaceful world, one where racism doesn't dictate their opportunities in life. And that, at present moment, is still a dream in most European countries, that despite their history, show such a level of aggression and segregation, that make one of darker skin wonder if slavery has not yet ended.

~ Robin Sacredfire

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

~ Derek Thompson

Human culture arises directly from how we overcome the challenges of survival. Some call culture a balance between decadence and celebration. The need for shelter becomes architecture, the rituals of fine cuisine wrought by celebrity chefs. Perhaps the most enduring are the rituals of romance. At its highest expression the artistry of love is the subject of exquisite effort. It is when we are the most human.

~ David Ai

Where is the culture of cleanliness?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The culture the leader creates impacts the feedback a leader receives.

~ Ron Edmondson

In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.

~ Aldous Huxley

We have reached the end of one era, and now we don't know what is all around us. Because we're already in a new era, and it is very different from the old one. Science and the world of technology are both changing everything so quickly, even our bodies. So the original ancient culture was present here, but to no avail, at this point in history it has come to stop. It still has some effect, some kind of continuity, but it cannot analyse and reformulate things, it cannot impact things with absolute strength. The age to follow will be full of dangers. It will be full of difficulties. In all likelihood, it will not be a good future for mankind. It is even possible this new era will mean the end of mankind.

~ László Krasznahorkai

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect.

~ Mary Catherine Bateson

As you get the rhythm you discern how to win.

~ Miyamoto Musashi

ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion

~ Patricia Crone

When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational.

~ F.s. Michaels

Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquired through domestic or scholastic inculcation of legitimate culture. This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. . . . In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name.

~ Pierre Bourdieu