Culture Quotes

The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.

~ Tim Chester

The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?

~ Roger Kimball

On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God.

~ Stanley Hauerwas

Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.

~ Roger Kimball

Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.

~ Edgar H. Schein

Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.[Chapter X - 15,16]

~ Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.

~ Rollo May

At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

~ Rollo May

We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.

~ Evan Thompson

A man becomes God. This is the culture of life power of a human being. This is such a culture of unimaginable life power.The term God is the self -prejudiced word. This is used to explain the thing. But whatever happens is encircling a man.

~ Sri Jibankrishna Or Diamond

It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.

~ Rollo May

The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, “Then was then, now is now”, is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth.

~ Pope Francis

If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

~ Richard Wright

It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.

~ Antonin Scalia

We need to move from the existing culture of compliance in cybersecurity to developing a culture of excellence in mitigating Cyber threats.

~ Arzak Khan

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word integration. To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

~ Enoch Powell

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

~ Thomas Sowell

There is an unseen river of communication that forever flows -- dark and powerful.

~ Sharon M. Draper

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles—something about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table—but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life there wasn't difficult enough to warrant an adult's belief in magic.

~ Sara Nović

Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.

~ Andrew Pettegree

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu soy sauce. It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.

~ Cynthia Kadohata

Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

~ Enoch Powell

Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.

~ A.j. Jacobs

Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets.

~ Leonardo Donofrio

His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.

~ Andrew Pettegree

God does not save us to make us forget our heritage, but to complete it.

~ Beth Moore

The scene is France. The theater is the world.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

~ Mark Kurlansky

A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.

~ Mark Kurlansky

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.

~ Tony Horwitz

The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

When he came home with the traditional gift of underwear bought with his first paycheck, she barely looked at it, and coldly shot at him, “What about what you were going to be?

~ Kyung-Sook Shin

Jack and Bobby Kennedy were too young, too attached to real family to transfer affection and loyalty to those that of their blood or region or upbringing.

~ David Pietrusza

Litterature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces.

~ Gad Saad