Culture Quotes

Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would be another reminder why the American society as a whole could never be call itself highbrow, why its easy availability of of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them.

~ Imbolo Mbue

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.

~ Ortega Y Gasset

Consistent and clear communication creates a dynamic and sustainable culture that is there when your not there.

~ Farshad Asl

Biologically valid races are not real, but cultural racism is, and we must understand how this cultural reality affects our everyday interactions.

~ Robert Wald Sussman

Life on earth survives thanks to diversity, says Sekunda, because changing circumstances means today's winners can suddenly become tomorrow's losers. When the meteor hits, when the Green Revolution fails, when the bees unexpectedly die, the kind of anomalous diversity found in the Galapagos Islands—or in the technology of Japan—is exactly what will save us from the most dangerous failure of all: global success.

~ Momus

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.

~ Amor Towles

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

~ David Fleming

Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

~ Willa Cather

These outlanders are peculiar, aren’t they?Longbow smiled faintly. They seem to think that we’re the peculiar ones. Their lives are very complicated, but we try our best to keep everything simple. I’m not sure exactly why, but that seems to offend them for some reason.

~ David Eddings

My family’s tradition of ‘matching-matching’ names is so obsessive, it’s against the order of nature. When my uncles Anil and Anant married, they took advantage of a heinous custom in Marathi weddings. After the pheras, a dish of uncooked rice is placed before the newlyweds, and whatever name the husband chooses to write in the rice becomes the new name of his wife.Because marriage in our culture is akin to buying a puppy at a pet shop and saying, ‘I am your new owner, and I shall call you Flu y.’So Anil Adarkar brought home Asha Adarkar (née Kiran), and Anant Adarkar brought home Anita Adarkar (née Geeta). And to complete this picture of divine perfection they named their children Aniket, and Ashwini and Ashleysha, respectively.

~ Nikita Deshpande

Normality is an illusion, created by a conservative culture to control behaviour

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Englishmen did not speak to strangers on trains ...

~ Ken Follett

I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.

~ Guy Mankowski

Culture is a fibreglass condom suit - highly restrictive, uncomfortable and itchy as hell.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Culture is a virus. It distorts your view of the world and destroys your capacity to think independently.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

It's not a crime to offend others; in fact, it's pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures. We live in a world full of people with different backgrounds, interests, and values, and we must learn to accept that there will be clashes. As long as the differences do no harm, we should back off and accept them

~ P.z. Myers

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

~ Colin Woodard

Becoming 'color blind' isn't helpful. Who you are matters, how you are matters. Things like race and culture are a manifestation of flows of creation. Your identity doesn't just matter, without it your soul can't interact with the world. The key is we need to understand that all races, ethnic groups, cultures and like treasures are equal and we must remember to follow our soul rather than our identity. The identity is something the soul works through, not the other way around.

~ Rebekah Elizabeth Gamble

One paid for one's knowledge with one's skin.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

~ Maxine Hong Kingston

you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.

~ Lauren Beukes

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

~ J.c. Villamere

Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -”the solid state of “water.

~ Pearl Zhu

Organizational culture is just like the “Operation System” of the organization, you need reboot periodically to keep it running smoothly.

~ Pearl Zhu

Culture is collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors.

~ Pearl Zhu

Culture should be a business ‘app,’ everyone can apply it daily.

~ Pearl Zhu

Agile is more a “direction,” than an “end.” Transforming to Agile culture means the business knows the direction they want to go on.

~ Pearl Zhu

Modern Boards set key tones in building fact-based business culture.

~ Pearl Zhu

Our focus should not be on emerging technologies, but on emerging cultural practices.

~ Henry Jenkins

Isn't it interesting how nationalistic attitudes foster the notion that being gay is 'un-(fill in your nationality/ religion/ culture here)'?

~ Christina Engela

Being digital-ready is an overarching approach via building a set of “digital -flavored” cultures and taking a series of stepwise practices.

~ Pearl Zhu

Apparently, when conditions were right, peoples of all world regions were quite capable of transforming wild plants into domesticated crops—a good point to keep in mind when next you hear someone claim that some cultures (usually their own) are more inventive or creative than others.

~ James Peoples

Jasmine shook her head. She had forgotten about the tales of the Jinn that her father warned her about. Now, being here the memories were returning like a slow and purposeful spider. With its long, black legs the nightmares would creep into her mind each time she closed her eyes. Then, she would see through the creature’s murky eyes. She would see the carcass of a deer as it lay in the glistening white. She would watch the hyena tearing at its sweated flesh, blood seeping into the snow forming warm pools of death around her feet. And in that moment, the deer shifted. It shifted into the shape of a young boy.

~ Shereen Malherbe

It's not a crime to offend others; in fact, it's pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures. We live in a world full of people with different backgrounds, interests, and values, and we must learn to accept that there will be clashes. As long as the differences do no harm, we should back off and accept them.

~ Pz Myers

American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.

~ Andi Zeisler

The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.

~ Poul Anderson

Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture — these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.

~ Fuminori Nakamura

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.

~ Roger Kimball

The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.

~ Juliet Winters Carpenter