Culture Quotes

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

~ Pat Buchanan

I plan to see St. Louis as a global competitor. As an international trade hub, as an incubator of new companies, as a place of culture and the arts, as a magnet for immigrants, for entrepreneurs, for animal lovers, and for gays, as a city of parks and trails, and as the sort of place that figures in young people's dreams.

~ Francis G. Slay

Father's Day is hopefully a time when the culture says, 'This is our moment to look at who our men and boys are.'

~ Michael Gurian

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

~ Sloane Crosley

Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.

~ Joshua Foer

Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of doom or struggle.

~ Paul Di Filippo

I talk about race and culture, and that's what my fans respond to. If you grew up in an environment where race and culture were never an issue for you, or where you don't see the humor in our so-called differences, then you might not respond to what I'm doing.

~ Russell Peters

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

~ Chris Jordan

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

~ Russell Baker

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

~ Katherine Dunn

What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so, you may change the culture and just possibly, for a moment, change life itself.

~ Malcolm Mclaren

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.

~ Rhys Ifans

The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.

~ Adam Grant

We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.

~ J. D. Vance

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

~ Steven Pinker

In college football, fans wallow in a culture of failure. Unless you root for Miami, you sadly wait for disaster to strike your team in a manner not seen outside of Fenway Park.

~ Stephen Rodrick

Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. It's how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture.

~ Wendell Pierce

Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.

~ Andy Serkis

New Age values are conscious evolution, a non-sectarian society, a non-military culture, global sharing, healing the environment, sustainable economies, self-determination, social justice, economic empowerment of the poor, love, compassion in action, going beyond religious fundamentalism, going beyond nationalism-extreme nationalism, culture.

~ Deepak Chopra

I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the culture of organic, chemical-free parenting, but we're often participants.

~ Adam Davidson

Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them. Parenting can pose unique challenges for introverted parents, who fear that their own painful experiences will be repeated in their children's lives.

~ Susan Cain

For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black's tweets.

~ Michael Showalter

I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.

~ Trent Reznor

I don't like the ironic tone that our pop culture, in the world, has taken. Everything is 'ironic.' Everything is 'cool.'

~ Alejandro González Iñárritu

When your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you.

~ Trent Reznor

My high school didn't have a football team; we just had like a surf team, because I grew up in Encinitas, California, which is the ultimate place where everyone skated or surfed, so it was a very different culture. It was, like, cool to be the art kid.

~ Emily Ratajkowski

Goteborg used to be a not very cool place to live. The culture centered around shrimp and bingo. Bands played Copenhagen and Stockholm and skipped Goteborg.

~ Jens Lekman

Selling MP3s or physical copies, it's still cool, but I think it's slowly becoming outdated to where people just want to build a culture.

~ Diplo

It's really cool to see glowsticks at the show, to see dance music culture infiltrating and becoming one with the metal community.

~ Jonathan Davis

As a culture or a civilisation, we are a bit juvenile; it's like 'Oh, I have all this power, whoa, this is so cool, I can transform the earth and I can produce all this wealth. But we're blinded by our success in a naive way. There's more to life, actually, and I think the sustainability issue is also helpful in reminding us about that.

~ Tino Sehgal

Coming up, the music of my era was very conscious. I grew up on Public Enemy, and it was popular culture to be aware. People were wearing Malcolm X T-shirts and Malcolm X hats. It was a very cool thing to know who Malcolm X was. It was all in the lyrics. It was trendy to be conscious and aware.

~ D'angelo

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

~ Narada Michael Walden

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

~ Shirin Neshat

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

~ John Mcafee

I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

~ Wole Soyinka

America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.

~ Laurie Helgoe

I wanted to really ingrain myself in the culture and the people. And I apologize about having an allergy to dairy products that gives me some irritable bowels, but other than that, I mean, I've embraced just about everything else Wisconsin - especially when it comes to sports, but also the people and the interactions with our fans.

~ Aaron Rodgers

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

~ Douglas Coupland

I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.

~ David Shields

Restaurants and chefs have become followed by such a broad swath of the public, in a way that used to be reserved for sports stars, movie stars, and theater actors. Restaurants are in the firmament of today's common culture.

~ Danny Meyer